


Sleeping with Ghosts

by Zippa6



Series: Where She Most Satisfies [4]
Category: Star Wars, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, Drama & Romance, Established Relationship, F/M, Love/Hate, M/M, Multi, Multiple Pairings, Multiple Partners, POV Original Female Character, Polyamory, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2019-07-29 16:01:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 47,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16267577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zippa6/pseuds/Zippa6
Summary: Miranda Galan, who survived the Jedi Killer eight years ago, is now the Chief Counselor and Consort of the First Order, a third of the ruling Triumvirate with Supreme Leader Kylo Ren and General Armitage Hux. The end of the war with the New Republic imminent, the Resistance makes a last bid for negotiating terms of surrender. Victory seems to be a certainty. So what's delaying the First Order's triumph?Drama. Lots of it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As this is part of a series, I'll be posting pertinent information in the notes at the beginning.
> 
> I've tried to weave in as much exposition as I could without it being too clunky, but please feel free to ask me questions if you haven't read the first two parts and want to know any background information. I don't expect anyone to necessarily read through 150K words to read this!
> 
> The title is from the song [Sleeping with Ghosts" by Placebo](https://youtu.be/PC2MFz6n4u0).  
> 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Supreme Leader, General, and Chief Counselor discuss the next step for the siege of Coruscant, but an unexpected call may change all of their plans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Background information: Miranda Galan was Ben Solo's friend at Luke Skywalker's Jedi Temple, training alongside him. She left the Temple when her mother died, however, and thus survived its destruction. Eight years later, Kylo Ren, falling apart, finds her where she's hiding on a planet called Gaia (it's basically Earth, with Earth culture) and asks her to come be with him, and to help him uncover an assassination plot against him. This involves seducing General Hux (because of course), but then everyone catches feelings and it gets complicated. While that's happening, the three stop a plan by the Resistance to take in Force-sensitive children and train them as Jedi.

### CHAPTER ONE

#### The _Finalizer_ , Above Coruscant, Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

The siege of Coruscant has lasted a month. The New Republic won’t concede to withdraw all its troops from Coruscant after the First Order takes the Federal District in Galactic City. There are First Order troops on the ground, waves of them taking even more territory, as the fleet of Star Destroyers forms a blockade to prevent any ships from bringing in reinforcements or escaping the surface. The planet’s defense systems have been destroyed, and the light fighters being sent up to distract from the central mission have all but disappeared.

The end is imminent, and the First Order will soon have control over the core worlds. It’s only a question of the lengths it’s willing to take to make the New Republic finally surrender.

The Supreme Leader and General Hux spend much of their time on the bridge of the _Finalizer_ , directing operations, while I monitor the barrage of correspondence from allies and enemies alike from my office. System after system is either defecting or liberating itself, depending on who is describing it. But it means that we have ascertain their loyalty to the First Order. Diplomacy has never been part of the Order’s strategies, so identifying officers who can fill those roles has been taxing.

My most pressing diplomatic project now is Empress Leeya of the Regency Worlds — the system Hux’s home planet Arkanis is the capital of. She’s been doggedly committed to maintaining neutrality. The New Republic is no longer occupying Arkanis, but she won’t declare allegiance to the First Order either. I’ve spoken to the Empress, a short, full-figured woman fantastically bedecked in layers of lace and a headdress of polished and glinting seashells, her face painted and veiled so it’s impossible to know her age, but she disdains me as a courtesan and schemer from plebeian stock. I’ll have to find someone to act as emissary between us, it seems.

But that is secondary while we are focused on Coruscant. Once this system is taken, the others will see that they have to fall in line. When Ben, Armitage, and I — or as the rest of the galaxy now knows us, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, General Hux, and Chief Counselor Miranda Galan (Lady Ren if they watch _Galaxy Insider_ ) — aren’t at our separate tasks, we are all in Ben’s office, arguing ways forward. Today, we’ve been in here for an hour, debating how to finally snuff the Resistance’s seeming inextinguishable resolve.

“Continue to target the infrastructure,” I say, “not the people.”

“We need the infrastructure intact for when we take the planet,” Hux says. “Think in the long term.”

We’re sitting in black squarish chairs built to the scale of Ben’s tall, broad body. Slender and pale, his ginger hair perfectly combed and parted, Hux perches upright in his, his gloved hands on the arms, so as not to let the tall, angular frame of it swallow him. I lounge in mine, unconcerned with military bearing, my feet tucked under the hem of my black pleated gaberwool skirt, my boots lying on the floor. Ben sits across from us, his long legs stretched out, his gaze penetrating.

“I _am_ thinking long—term,” I say. “The First Order is excellent at building infrastructure, but not public trust. If you target civilians, you’ll never gain the latter.”

Hux sighs. He dislikes what he calls my “half measures.”

“Besides,” I say, “you certainly didn’t think about preserving the infrastructure of Hosnian Prime.”

And now Hux closes his eyes. It’s what I always return to. The destruction of the Hosnian system. His hands grip the arms of his chair.

“Miranda,” he says in his measured voice. “That is not helpful to our discussion.”

“Isn’t it? Remember your mistakes, Armitage. In any case, I’m not advocating _destroying_ the infrastructure. I’m advocating taking over operations of the planet’s utilities — water, power, fuel production.”

“That’s even worse. It carries a much greater risk to the troops on the ground than aerial bombardment. The New Republic has placed most of their defensive capabilities around utilities.”

“Why do we have ground troops if it’s not for operations like this, then, Hux?” Ben cuts in, his low voice parting the tension between Hux and me. “Your troops are highly trained, as you like to remind us, so _use_ them.”

Hux swallows and purses his lips. “Yes, Supreme Leader,” he finally says.

“Go put in the orders,” Ben says. “I’ll leave the specifics of the tactics to you.”

Hux nods and stands. He gives me a scathing look before he leaves, but I smile. We’ll just have to work it out later.

Ben squeezes his eyes shut and then begins to draw off his gloves when Hux has gone. “Gods, I thought we’d never get to a reason for him to leave.”

“When was the last time you slept?” I ask.

He is as beautiful as ever, with his dark hair and red mouth, but his eyes have dark circles beneath them and he is paler than usual. His posture softens.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Hux was disagreeing with me just for the sake of arguing. He knows I’m right,” I say. “And my thoughts are buzzing so much I can’t keep track of them. We're all half-crazy from sleep deprivation.”

“I’m not crazy, half or otherwise.” He leans back, taps his hand on his thigh. “Come here,” he commands.

I smirk at him as I rise. “Yes, Supreme Leader,” I say, and even make a small curtsy.

I pad across the shiny black floor in my stockinged feet and then sit down on his lap, wrapping my arms over his shoulders so we can face each other.

“You’re not having dinner with Hux tonight, are you?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

There is a delicate balance between the three of us that make up the First Order’s unofficial triumvirate, one that no one else knows the details of. The propvids make no secret of my relationship with the Supreme Leader. My new title of Chief Counselor and Consort will be formalized in a ceremony of some sort when we take up residence on Coruscant. Not exactly a marriage, but not exactly _not_ a marriage.

What General Hux and I are to each other is a matter of gossip, very near an open secret, at least among the senior officers on the _Finalizer_. No one is under the delusion that the Supreme Leader is being deceived — that he _can_ be deceived. It isn’t so much a scandal as a pertinent detail for schemers and rank-risers. To please both the Supreme Leader and the General, they must please _me_. I try to wear this power lightly, as if it doesn’t even exist at all — except if I’m crossed.

The time I spend with either Ben or Hux is a matter of schedules and plans as much as whims and desires. We all have time together and time apart and time alone. The times when Ben and Hux are alone without me have been growing more frequent. They are in each other’s confidences more often than they used to be, the bond of their history — the shared experience of being under Snoke’s thumb — finally asserting itself. I find them in Ben’s office, in quiet conference, or see them walking the corridors of the _Finalizer_ , shoulders almost brushing, intent on the other’s words and voice. I see Hux watch the Supreme Leader’s broad back when he walks away, and I feel the words unspoken between them, the actions untaken.

And then there is the time when we are triumvirs, when we are performing for the prop vids. Hux and I side-by-side, a step behind Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, the three-in-one like a mystic trinity from a dead religion. The troops, the officers, the inhabitants of the galaxy — they don’t know we govern mostly through disagreement, though only about methods and tactics, not objectives.

“Will you have dinner with me, then?” Ben asks.

“Of course. My quarters?”

“No,” he says. “Not this time. The dining hall.”

I frown. “You never eat there.”

He tucks his head under my chin, like a cat. “I think it’s important that I make some appearances with the officers, maybe even with the stormtroopers, in more informal settings. For the sake of morale.”

I laugh. “You’re going to make everyone uncomfortable and self-conscious while they eat their soup.”

“It’s going to give me no pleasure, either. But it’s better that than them thinking I’m an absent leader. They see you and Hux all the time.”

“Oh, is _that_ what this is about?”

Hux and I are coveted dinner companions, and officers clamber for the distinction of having drinks in the private lounge with us or being invited to dine at Hux’s table. A chance to have our ears, to demonstrate their value. Accomplishments slipped into small talk with the General, extravagant compliments paid to the Counselor from a chivalric distance, private confidences whispered.

Ben laughs quietly. “You have a big opinion of yourself.”

“I do. And you love it. But, yes. Dinner in the officer’s hall. At seven?”

“Mmm,” he hums. “No. In my quarters at six, then dinner at eight.”

“I see.”

He untucks his head and puts his arms around my waist to pull me in for a kiss. I have his bottom lip between my teeth when my comm beeps.

Ben pulls away and puts his mouth on my neck. “Ignore it,” he whispers, and though a thrill runs through me at the contact of his breath on my skin, I answer.

My aide, Lieutenant Petra Sloane, is calling me.

“Counselor Galan, you have a private call coming in on your office line,” she says, using my title and last name, so I know it’s something serious.

“Did I have a call scheduled?” I ask.

“No, ma’am.”

Ben unfastens my high-collared uniform jacket as I talk, his big fingers fumbling on the tiny hooks.

“Then tell them to schedule one. I’m… I’m in conference with the Supreme Leader.”

“Yes, but… Miranda, I think you’ll want to take this call.” Her voice shifts into a whisper, as if that will keep Ben from hearing her.

“Well, who is it?” I say, annoyance creeping into my tone.

Ben has managed to open enough hooks to fit his hand in my jacket, but he grimaces in frustration at finding my blouse beneath it.

“I promised I wouldn’t say,” Petra says, sounding distressed. “Not unless we were alone.”

Petra is as good a person as you can find in a First Order officer, and she’s my friend as well as my aide. A quick skim of her emotions tells me she’s being sincere. Ben grits his teeth, and I feel a growl begin to form in his throat, something about nothing being hidden from the Supreme Leader, but I put my hand on his arm.

“All right,” I say, and close my comm.

“I’d better see what this is all about,” I say to Ben.

He presses his lips together and nods, but when I’ve closed the commlink the growl that was forming comes out, though now there’s a hint of petulance in it.

“Who could possibly be so important?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m going to take the call. To find out. Petra has excellent judgment, so I trust that this _is_ important.”

“I suppose I’ll have to wait to see if you’ll tell me who it is.”

“I suppose,” I say, and his anger flares briefly before he conquers it.

I get up from Ben’s lap, straighten my skirt, and refasten my jacket. I smooth down my hair and put my polished knee-high boots on. The siege has been a time for austerity, solemnity, and solidarity, so I am in my very best First Order form, even if I wear my personal insignia of a black dragon, clutching a pearl in its claw, within a red circle, on my left sleeve instead of the First Order wheel. It’s a sign of my impartiality in my role as Chief Counselor, as I remind Hux often.

Ben watches me for a moment and then resettles, leaning into one elbow on the arm of his chair, fist against his temple. He worries at his bottom lip as he thinks. I cross to the door that connects our offices.

Petra is waiting inside. At a glance, she seems perfectly composed, as usual, her warm brown skin smooth, her full lips placid, her hazel eyes fixed on her datapad. But I can tell by the way she sits at the edge of the purple sofa and grips her datapad that she’s anxious. She stands when I walk in.

“I’m sorry, Miranda,” she says. “I know it’s not proper, but this seemed important enough to break protocol. Was the Supreme Leader —”

“Don’t worry about him,” I say, and I close my mind to him, which I’ve grown quite good at since the beginning of my relationship with Hux. “Now. Who is it?”

“A representative from the Resistance, ma’am. Captain Poe Dameron. But he says he is contacting you on his superior’s behalf.”

 _Poe Dameron_. A name from my past, the end of my old past. I’m on my third life now — there was Mira Galan the apprentice Jedi; then Isobel Esch, the identity I took for the eight years when I was in hiding from the Jedi Killer; and now, well, I am Chief Counselor Miranda Galan — and this is whom Captain Dameron, who was a cocky flyboy when I knew him, wants to speak with. The last time I saw him he was leaving me at my little house on Gaia, and we kissed goodbye while Leia wasn’t watching — having done more than kiss when she wasn’t present a few nights before.

I never expected to see him again.

“Put him through,” I say to Petra as I settle on my sofa, arranging myself to look as unconcerned as I possibly can.

Petra opens the connection. I nod at her, and she leaves my office.

He appears before me, life-sized, the clarity of my First Order holoprojector rendering him alarmingly real. He’s sitting on a swiveling chair, and looks much the same — the pilot’s self-assurance, the hint of dark stubble on his strong jaw, the dark eyes intense in a way entirely different from Ben’s. He’s gone a bit gray at the temples, though, and the lines on his face are those of someone who has lost many people. But he has not lost the person whom he’s calling on behalf of. His superior. General Leia Organa. I know that with certainty. She is there, at the edges of my consciousness in the Force, and I in hers. Waiting, as I wait, for the moment when we see each other again.

“Captain Dameron,” I say. “This is unexpected. And irregular.”

He starts slightly at the sound of my voice, and I see his eyes narrow slightly as he studies me. I am not the girl he left on Gaia, alone and frightened, but determined to bear up. He is seeing me in my full First Order regalia — black military-style uniform, black hair pulled back severely, lips painted the color of dried blood, eyes lined with sharpened black wings. None of my gentle smiles that I wear in the propvids to encourage the stormtroopers or to persuade the people of newly First Order-allied systems of the humanity of the Supreme Leader.

“Counselor Galan,” he says. “It’s… a pleasure to see you again after so many years. Though, like you said, it’s not in a way either of us expected, I’m sure.”

“No,” I say, remembering the flash of white teeth that is his smile. That smile wants to come through, badly. My First Order persona hasn’t overwritten who I am in his imagination.

“Based on the vids, you get enough boring formality from the First Order, so I’ll get straight to it,” he says. He leans forward, bracing his hands on his knees, elbows turned out. “General Organa wants to discuss terms.”

I don’t let the words shake me.

“The terms the New Republic proposed when the First Order arrived on Coruscant were non-starters, Captain.”

“General Organa doesn’t want to discuss terms as a representative for the New Republic, Counselor. She is speaking on behalf of the Resistance only.”

I almost laugh. “Why would we need to discuss terms with the Resistance? You’re on your last legs. The next offensive will thoroughly defeat you, and then the New Republic will be forced to negotiate.”

“That’s what we’re hoping to avoid — another offensive.” Poe grimaces and sighs, “Miranda, I know you — or at least I thought I did. I know you want to avoid unnecessary loss of life as much as we do.”

I stiffen. I’ve grown unaccustomed to being treated with familiarity by anyone save Ben and Hux.

“It’s useless to negotiate with only the Resistance,” I say. “The New Republic won’t be bound by any agreements the First Order makes with you.”

Poe sighs. There’s something he is unwilling to reveal, but I sense the contours of it, and can guess at the rest.

“Unless… you know that the New Republic has already given up,” I say. “It never recovered from the destruction of the Hosnian system and its own infighting. It’s abandoned you. So the Resistance is all that’s left to oppose us.”

Poe sits up straight and then leans away from my image. There’s a current of fear, an image of an interrogation rack and Kylo Ren. I push it aside, unwilling to see Ben as the masked figure of Poe’s memory.

“Poe,” I say, softening my tone. “You _do_ know me, and you know what I am. So don’t try to hide anything from me.”

He nods.

“What are you prepared to agree to in return for opening talks?” I ask. “It will have to be significant.”

“We know you’re going to target Coruscant’s utilities next. We will withdraw our defenses and allow the First Order to take over all the operations except for fuel production.”

His tone is resigned. He is making this concession against his own wishes. Poe would fight to the end, bravely and stupidly.

“Well, that is a place to begin,” I say. “I’ll have to speak to the Supreme Leader, of course.”

“There’s a condition to that concession,” Poe says. “The negotions are to take place on Coruscant itself, and you will be the sole representative from the First Order. The Supreme Leader, General Hux — they’re not going to step foot on Coruscant.”

And here I falter. “What?” I say. “Doesn’t Leia want to —” I break off before I say _see Ben_. “General Organa surely knows that any agreement must be approved by the Supreme Leader to be binding.”

“She knows that. She just doesn’t want anyone on Coruscant but _you_. She feels that any other presence would be a… distraction.”

 _Her own son a “distraction,”_ I want to spit, but at the same time I understand.

“All right,” I say. “But if that’s going to be a precondition, I have one of my own.” I hold him in my gaze for a beat. “ _Wherever_ the talks are held — and I’m not convinced Coruscant is the best place — that _girl_ , the one who’s been trying to steal Force-sensitive children, is to be nowhere near the system.”

“Rey isn’t —” Poe begins, but then breaks off. “I’ll relay that.”

“Good. Give me until 0900 tomorrow,” I say. “I’ll discuss this with the Supreme Leader and General Hux and be in contact.”

Poe nods, looking grave. “I’ll let General Organa know. And, hey, Counselor?”

“What?”

He grins now, those teeth making an appearance. “Say hi to General Hugs for me, would you?”

And I can’t help it. I laugh.

“There she is,” Poe says, and then closes the link.

I’m left with the smile on my lips as a remembrance of a different time, one that I’ve lost. And with a name in my mind that reminds me of what I have to lose now. _Rey._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: It's been awhile.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Miranda delivers Poe Dameron's message to the Supreme Leader.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Porn chapter already!
> 
> As always, feel free to ask questions if you want some background info!

### CHAPTER TWO

#### The _Finalizer_ , Above Coruscant, Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

I stand. I pace from my sofa to the window overlooking the stormtrooper drilling area below. Amidst the ranks pristine white armor contrasting starkly with shiny black floors, I catch sight of a gleam of artificial lighting on slicked-down ginger hair. Hux, reviewing the troops, hands clasped behind his back, his black greatcoat swaying behind him. He looks as he always does, his uniform and posture perfect, but I know he is weary — so weary that I can feel it in the Force. He’s not only overseeing the battle operations on Coruscant; much of his time since returning to the _Finalizer_ has been spent on rebuilding the First Order’s fleet and replenishing the ranks after the catastrophic loss of the _Supremacy_. He probably hasn’t even closed his eyes in days.

I think of a time not so long ago when Ben, Hux, and I fell asleep on the floor of my quarters, or when I nestled with Ben in the bed in my Gaian bungalow, or with Hux in his enormous black bed from Arkanis. Sleep is the most decadent of fantasies right now on the _Finalizer_. We’re all being kept going with stimshots and tea and caff and a kind of buzzing exhaustion that has likely shaved months off our lifespans.

It needs to end. But I also can’t put off speaking to Ben about his mother’s proposal. So I go back into his office after sending a few _Go get some sleep_ thoughts Hux’s way. I’m not sure if I’m imagining seeing his posture break for a minute, but his gaze definitely turns upward to where he knows my office is. It’s too far to see his scowl, but I can imagine it.

“All right, I _do_ have to tell you about who that was,” I say as walk through the _swooshing_ door, being more dramatic than I mean to be.

Ben is sitting much as he was when I left him, and he looks at me with raised eyebrows, saying nothing. I sit down across from him, taking off my boots and settling my emotions before I tell him about the call. His expression doesn’t change when I tell him who it was, and his jaw only slightly tightens when I tell him that his mother wants me to be the First Order’s sole representative in negotiations.

“Well?” I say at his silence.

“No,” he replies, possibly more defiantly than resolutely. “There’s nothing the Resistance can offer us that’s worth legitimizing them. That’s what negotiations would do — give them a status that they don’t deserve and I’m not going to give them. They’re less than inconsequential.” His grits his teeth. “They’re nothing.”

“But this isn’t just about the Resistance, Ben,” I say.

“I hope you don’t think that I can be influenced by the kind of attachments you still have to our old life, Mira.”

The seam of his scar along the right side of his face grows livid where it is deepest, along his cheekbone, as his face flushes. He’s more affected by attachments than he wants to reveal. But he can’t keep it from me. I feel it, the cord that connects him to Leia, frayed by pain but impossible to sever. I used to feel the ferocity of my own mother’s love for me. I know Ben feels his mother’s love the same way. He feels how she longs for him, to place her hands on his face again, to kiss the top of his head as she did thousands of times when he was a baby, when he was a child. To protect him. That is where she feels the pain most keenly — her failure to protect Ben from Snoke, to protect him from his own darkness.

And in Leia, that mother’s love is a Force-sensitive mother’s love for a Force-sensitive child. That bond — a shared body becomes shared thoughts and feelings. Ben having a bad day in the training arena or in meditation could break into her composure, even when they were hundreds of clicks apart.

I’ve felt something near to it recently, with the Force-sensitive children we rescued on Gaia. The four girls — Allegra, Kayta, Sarai, and Gemma — have been reunited with their families after the Church of the Force took them under the guise of educating them, but with the plan to turn them over to the Resistance. To the girl — _Rey_ — who intended to train them as Jedi. I feel their loneliness sometimes, something I recognize from when I was a child. That feeling of being alone in your abilities, of being different, and of fearing what it is that makes you different. I ache for them, and only having seen the joy and gratitude of their parents upon the return of the children keeps me from wanting to gather them back onto the _Finalizer_ , where they can be near me and the Supreme Leader — two adults who understand them and are like them.

 _When the war is over, maybe,_ I tell myself. An academy for Force-sensitive children, but not like the Jedi Temple — a place where they can find their own way in the Force. A school that won’t tell kids like Ben and I were that their passions are suspect, that their attachments are too intense.

Still, I have Trist and Leo — General Hux’s boys, as those on the _Finalizer_ call them. Force-sensitive identical twins — blond, blue-eyed, sunny. Full of energy that has already dismantled and imperfectly reassembled two sparring droids, sent Hux’s tabby cat Millicent into a weeklong frenzy of displaced aggression, and made Lieutenant Mitaka — somehow roped into looking after them on top of his regular duties — into even more of a high-strung ball of utterly lost-looking nerves.

I decide not to argue with Ben. Not just because I’m too tired but because there’s no surer way to get him thoroughly entrenched in his position. So I simply say, “Well, if it comes to it, I’m prepared to do it,” rise from the chair, and go to sit on his lap again.

But I feel his thought — about something else I was prepared to do. He resented it. Even though he _asked_ me to do it, even though my doing so uncovered Snoke’s cruelty surviving his death. Even though Hux’s devotion to me has ended his ruthless plotting to rid the First Order of Kylo Ren. He doesn’t resent it anymore, though.

I look into Ben’s eyes and watch them flicker and rove over my features as I take off my gloves and then lay them over the arm of the chair..

“Your eyes are almost entirely black,” he says. “Even with the light on them, there’s hardly any brown.”

I smile and tap my fingertips against his cheekbone, the unscarred one. “I know. Are you just noticing this?”

“No, it’s something I’ve always noticed, ever since we were kids. You watch and it’s like you pull in everything you see. You see things others don’t.”

“I see you,” I say.

“You do.”

He’s had more luck getting to skin by reaching under the hem of my jacket and untucking my blouse from my skirt. He closes his hand around the flesh at my hip, and we are lost in a kiss that we seem to just _fall_ into. This is what is what it is to love someone bound to you in the Force — a breath in, and then he and I are everything that exists, our bodies rising and falling and pressing against each other, the other’s pleasure just as much our own. His mouth tastes of cassia, the sweet, hot spice he chews to keep himself alert. I feel the thump of his heart through his tunic — one of those with cortosis mesh armor sewn into the lining. And as I push up my skirt and put my knees on either side of his hips, I feel the heat and pressure of his desire, as much through the Force as between my legs as he pulls me down to press against him. He groans out a command to the room to darken the huge windows overlooking the stormtrooper drilling area.

We’re so tired — I feel this too — but through the occupation and siege of Coruscant we’ve had so little time alone together that we devour this moment, like starving creatures.

I am better at the hooks on our uniforms than he is. Out of pure muscle memory I have his belt unfastened and tossed aside — lightsaber along with it, hitting the polished floor with a clatter — his tunic opened and thrown to the floor and his shirt following it.

Will I ever get used to the feeling of his skin, his muscles, his movement under my hands? Impossible. He is as familiar to me as I am to myself, yet touching him is a new thrill, every time. The history of Kylo Ren is etched into his body. Most obvious is the seam of the long scar along the right side of his chest and neck, starting as deep, wavering trail, dipping into his collarbone in a surer arc, and then up his cheek, ending with a gash through his eyebrow — made by an upward slash of his own grandfather’s lightsaber. But the story behind that… I push down my contempt for the girl who gave it to him. She has no place in here with us. Above his left hip is the gnarled flesh from the bowcaster bolt. I close my hand around it and feel his despair after he killed his father — a man who was very near a father to me as well — and the anguish in Chewbacca’s cry, as much for his best friend as for the boy Ben whom he had loved. This, I hold onto. That love is one I share.

The puckered skin of the burn scar on the front of his left shoulder, though, is where our greatest shared history lies. The night at the Temple — when he destroyed it, when he killed our friends while I was mourning my mother on Tatooine — the fire had spread through all the buildings (the library where he and I held hands and meditated, the dormitories where we talked long into the night when everyone else had gone home for the Life Day break, the corridors where we ran with our sparring sabers in our hands), and burning debris had fallen onto him.

When the other students had challenged him with their lightsabers that night, none could touch him — they never could. But the fire, the uncontrollable element that had once burned away Anakin Skywalker and then singed Ben Solo into a shadow — that was what could harm him, what could penetrate his skin. And the pain of what he had done — not what I thought before, the pain of the girl’s rejection —  is what brought him back to me. That is the pain we share, and part of what binds us together.

So it is part of every moment like this — my desire and my loathing and my grief, bundled together and always wanting _more_ of him.

I see too, the faint marks along his shoulders, raked across his chest — those are what I have done, the marks of my teeth and fingernails. So I take pity on him and finish unfastening my jacket and then unbutton the black blouse beneath it. He pulls both off my shoulders and huffs with impatience at the corset beneath it, boned with cortosis mesh, just like his tunic. I laugh and bat his fumbling hands away from the hooks on the back. Once it’s off, he pulls me to him, my bare skin against his chest now and I slide my hand along the muscled plane of his stomach, over the dark hair leading into the waistband of his trousers. I have my hand around him as he moans into my mouth, and his cock throbs against my grip, the smooth, veined skin thrumming with his want. I pull myself down to the floor along with his trousers. I tug off his boots as I get my lips around the head of his cock, teasing there for a moment before sliding it in until the end taps my palette, laughing lightly as I touch my teeth to the skin near the base, the way I’ve learned he likes.

“You fucking Nightsister,” he groans, his voice rumbling in his chest, a voice like that of no one else I’ve ever met.

He puts his hands under my arms and stands me up, unbuckles the belt from which my own lightsaber hangs, but this he sets down carefully, almost reverently beside his chair. Then he tugs open the fastenings of my skirt and lets it fall to the floor. Hands on my hips, fully encompassing each wing of my pelvic bones, he studies me, the way he does. He slides a single finger under the lace fabric of my underwear, brushing against the mound of my vulva but probing no farther, then brushing his hands down to the tops of my stockings, toying with the clasps of my garters, looking up at me — slouched in the huge black block of a chair, beautiful and bare, his erect cock nearly brushing his navel. He looks so careless, unharried.

I know he is not.

“I’m not going to unfasten them for you,” I say of my garters.

“I don’t need you to,” he says.

He tugs at the elasticated top of my left stocking, then releases it so it snaps against the skin of my inner thigh.

And then he stands. He towers over me, fully aware of his power and yet somehow gentle, even as he puts his arms around me, palms along my spine, and abruptly pulls me against him. He cranes himself downward over me to put his mouth, red and full and trembling, on mine, opening his, his tongue lightly tracing the sensitive inner surface of my lips. He steers me toward his desk as we kiss, and when I am against it, the black stone of its surface cold against me, he hoists me up, effortlessly, onto it. I put my legs around his hips and look up at him.

His face, half in shadow from his hair falling around it, his red lips soft and pliant from kisses, his eyes, glinting amber sparks in darker depths, fixed on mine.

“Beautiful Ben,” I say, smiling.

The words that used to be whispered between girls under rough blankets in dormitories, now mine exclusively. The fierceness of it always surprises me — me, who never cared one way or another about the devotion of my partners, except when they were in my bed, and who never would offer her own; me, who has spent afternoons smoking hashish and having languid sex with General Hux, of all people, wanting to possess someone so utterly. I am a whore, my conscious pricks at me; I am a hypocrite. But I push it away. I am a woman utterly devoted, and he can feel that, I remind myself; he takes me as I am.

He closes his hand around the lace of my underwear and draws them down over my stockinged legs, pausing to nestle his face between my legs, nuzzling my thighs wider until I laugh.

“That tickles,” I say. “Are you going to do some real work down there or are we going to get on with this?”

“ _Impatient_ ,” he says.

He drops the flimsy bit of lacy fabric onto the floor and kneels in front of me. Resting his fingertips lightly on the bare skin above my stockings, he looks up at me as it sends a shiver through me. His face is very still, serious.

“Do you want me to do this?” he asks, sliding his fingers higher.

I nod.

“Please say it,” he says.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, please.”

Still higher. “How about this? All right?”

“Ben, please —”

“Better,” he says. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Ben, you infuriating man, I want you to stop messing around and fuck me.”

He smiles wickedly. “And how much do you want me to do that?”

I put my feet under his arms and push up. Obediently, he rises, and then I hook a leg around him and pull him close. His cock throbs against my belly.

“As much as _you_ want to, Ben Solo,” I say.

“Is that right?”

“Yes.”

He braces himself with his hands on either side of me on the desk, leaning far forward over me until I’m pressed flat against it.

“Now?” he says.

He completely fills my vision. I see nothing else.

“Yes.”

I begin to reach down to guide him, but he catches my wrist in his hand, closing his fingers around it and then pressing my arm down on the desk as well.

“Always having to be in control,” he says. “You’re tired. Close your eyes.”

“Ben, I —”

“ _Close your eyes_.”

I do.

He teases me, moving his hips toward me, and then moving away as I raise mine to meet him when I feel the tip of his cock brushing my legs. I whimper in frustration and he laughs softly. I open my eyes at the sound, seeking out his face.

“Ah,” he says, raising his left hand and motioning in a downward wave. “Closed.”

“Or what?” I say.

“Or nothing,” he says. “I know you’ll do as you’re told this time.”

“Oh, you arrogant fucking —”

And I gasp as he is inside me with a sudden thrust and my eyes close without him having to command it again. I search out the edge of the desk with my free right hand, trying to get some way to steady myself as his movement shakes my whole body. His right hand still holds down my left wrist, and his left now grips my right thigh, keeping me in place. My arousal progresses too quickly for me to make sense of it, and Ben was right — I am exhausted — so I hear myself keening as if eavesdropping on someone else’s lovemaking, and with my eyes closed, the occasional quiet groan from Ben seems to be coming from far away.

“Do you like this?” he says, and I can tell from his voice that his teeth are gritted, that his expression is one of intent focus.

“Yes,” I manage to say.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, Ben.”

He stops moving, holding himself deep inside me. I ache.

“No, not right now,” he says. “Yes, what?”

“Yes, Supreme Leader.”

“Supreme Leader…?”

And here I defy him. I open my eyes, and I look into his. I see nothing gentle there, just ferocity, my own desire to possess him magnified and reflected back.

“Yes… Supreme Leader Kylo Ren.”

And here the ferocity overtakes him. He once again presses my arms down at the wrist and his teeth are on my neck, and the scent of his hair is musky and wild, a human animal smell. His weight on me is overpowering as he drives deeper and harder, and he tells me to scream. So I do. He calls me a whore, the way he did the first night we spent together, when my hate for Kylo Ren was like a living thing. So I wrench my left hand free and backhand him as hard as I can, knowing he can take the blow, on the unscarred side of his face. He laughs, showing his teeth, and thrusts harder, as if to split me apart, to cleave away of the part of me that is still part of the Light.

The Force is here with us, dark and penetrating and heavy.

It is in his blood when I get my teeth into his shoulder. And it is in the pain in my core as he cries out against my neck and his body tenses and then shakes with his release.

* * *

I take stock of my battle wounds later, as we curl up together in the chair. He has me cocooned in his long, strong arms, but still l can see the line of a bruise beginning across the back of my thigh, where the edge of the desk dug into it; the shape of his hands rising red on my wrists. I can’t see but can feel the welt on my neck where he bit and sucked at my skin. And there is the pulsing pain mingled with lingering pleasure between my legs.

“Did I hurt you?” he whispers, his chin on my shoulder, his lips close to my ear.

“Yes,” I say. “In a good way. Did I hurt you?”

He is quiet for a moment, then touches his left shoulder, the muscle where it meets his neck, and holds out his hand. His fingers are smeared with his blood. “Yes, but not enough. Far less than I deserve.”

I put my cheek on his forearm. He reaches down to the floor and finds his cloak to pull over us. The exhaustion takes us, then, and I am not even aware we fell asleep until I hear the blip of my comm.

“Ignore it,” Ben says blearily. It keeps blipping, and he growls. “I swear on the Force, I will —”

I answer it before he can get up and break something.

“This is Mitaka, Counselor, I’m sorry for disturbing you, ma’am.”

His voice sounds like the aural equivalent of a scared rabbit. Dophold Mitaka is Hux’s aide-de-camp, newly brought to the position after Petty Officer Thannisson was sent for reconditioning. I recommended him, even though he’s terrified of the Supreme Leader. He’s a good young man, nervous but smart. It’s smart to be afraid of Kylo Ren.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” I say. “What is it?”

“It’s General Hux,” he says. “He’s collapsed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter:
> 
>  
> 
> _“Ben, you’re not going to walk through the corridors with him like that,” I say._  
>   
>  _“And why not?”_  
>   
>  _“Because, he is your top General, and you can’t have people seeing him like — like — this.”_  
>   
>  _“They’ve seen worse.”_


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mira and Ben come to Hux's rescue, sort of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, feel free to ask questions if you want some background info!

### CHAPTER THREE

#### The _Finalizer_ , Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

Ben and I rush through the corridors of the _Finalizer_ to the bridge turbolift as officers and troopers leap out of our way and try to stand at attention as we pass. In fifteen minutes, the state of my disordered hair will be the talk of the ship. I think of Leia, bizarrely, how she taught me how to braid my hair and wind it around my head; I think of sitting on the grass with Ben and weaving a red ribbon through his padawan braid and laughing when he scowled at me. Ben’s mane of dark hair is in its usual disarray, so it draws no notice. What they’re more likely to remark on is that as the Supreme Leader strode by my side, he was still _putting on his gloves_. Unheard of.

“It would be just like him to die after we took all that trouble to make sure he didn’t get killed,” Ben says when we’re in the lift.

“Don’t joke,” I say, but I feel his anxiety along with mine.

Mitaka is there to meet us at the lift door, his face pale and serious, creasing into momentary fear when he sees Ben. He conquers it. Good lad. There’s hardly a bustle behind him, though. We seem to have beaten any medical staff to the bridge.

“He’s… over there, Supreme Leader,” Mitaka says, gesturing toward the huge front viewport.

Mitaka walks beside me as we go over, explaining. “He was all right, and then, he just dropped to his knees and then was… out. I thought we shouldn’t move him.”

And there he is, stretched out, cheek against the shiny black floor, his breath making a halo of fog. His arms are at his sides, palms up, the white skin of his wrists visible between his gloves and the cuffs of his greatcoat. He looks… peaceful. I kneel down next to him and hear a familiar snuffle. I look up at Ben.

“He’s asleep,” I say.

Ben sighs impatiently and Mitaka edges away, back toward his station at the control deck.

“Asleep?” Ben hisses down at me. “Of all the fucking times —“”

“Well, what other time has there been? And,” I add sheepishly, “I think this is my fault.”

“ _Your_ fault.”

“Earlier, I saw him from my office and I — it wasn’t exactly a mind trick, but I definitely tried to impress on him that he needed to sleep.”

I see the muscles in Ben’s jaw working. “He is _far_ too susceptible to you, Mira. You should be more careful.”

 _It’s not my fault_ , I want to say. But of course it is. I don’t know my own abilities. I’ve never been on as intimate terms with a non-Force sensitive person as I am with Hux, and my power in the Force has been growing since I’ve truly started using it again. Hux is so willing to be under my influence — at least in non-military matters — that I never know when I’m going to overstep my bounds.

The turbolift doors open again and a tiny, dark-haired woman exits, a white medical droid behind her. The _Finalizer’s_ Chief Physician, Doctor Zenda, is human, like all First Order personnel, but she seems far older than should be possible for a human. With her age comes a certain intolerance for bullshit. She’s also friends with Ben’s grandmother, one of only a handful who know the true identity of Madame Sten, my mistress of wardrobe, and that gives her certain privileges on the ship.

I hold out my hand to help her kneel beside Hux, but she shoos it away— and the medical droid too, when it tries to assist in her examination. She stoops over Hux, taking his pulse by hand, lifting his lids and shining a stylus light on his eyes. He murmurs and turns away.

“This is my medical verdict,” she says. “General Hux is asleep.”

“Well, yes, we know,” I say.

“Then what do you need me for? He needs a bed and twelve uninterrupted hours, not a doctor! All of you do. Those stimulant shots only work for so long before your body rejects them, you know.”

She straightens and smooths down her black lab coat, then turns to Ben. The whole bridge tenses as she raises her forefinger to the Supreme Leader.

“The three of you won’t get the First Order anywhere if you kill yourselves with exhaustion. You’re acting like cadets cramming for exams, not like the leaders of the strongest military power in the galaxy. Go get some sleep — doctor’s orders!” She looks at me and then back at Ben. “And in separate quarters. No _extracurricular activity._ Understood?”

My face is burning. I glance around the bridge. Everyone has averted their eyes. Ben doesn’t answer. I see Captain Peavey behind the helm, barely holding back a smile.

I stand. “Thank you for seeing to the General, Doctor Zenda,” I say. “We’ll make sure he gets some rest.”

She frowns back at me, her crepey skin folding into myriad tiny lines.

“None of your silver tongue, Counselor Galan,” she says. “Do I have to take you both by the ear and escort you to your beds myself?”

“Doctor Zenda, the Supreme Leader and I have many pressing —”

“They’ll _wait_ ,” she says.

“I have a call in the morning —”

“Do you need me to write you a doctor’s note?” she asks sarcastically. “Don’t forget the position you’re in. _The galaxy will wait for you.”_

I nod meekly.

“Good,” Zenda says. “I will check in with all three of you tomorrow afternoon to do the appropriate tests for indicators of excessive fatigue. Your cortisol levels are probably shocking. Remember how many people you are responsible for. Leaders who are overly tired are leaders who make mistakes. And any one of your mistakes could be catastrophic.”

She beckons to the medical droid, and they both get back on the lift. Ben and I are left staring stupidly down at Hux, who has now curled up with his hands tucked under his head.

“What are we going to do with him?” I whisper. “Should we have a gurney brought in?”

Ben sighs and then, wordlessly, bends over and hoists Hux up. He crosses the bridge with him slung over his shoulder. Mitaka and the rest of the bridge crew try to seem as if they’re looking away while watching from the corners of their eyes. Peavey, puffing out his cheeks in silent laughter, doesn’t disguise his amusement. I follow Ben to the turbolift, and as the doors close, I see Peavey let his breath out in a guffaw, bending over a console, one hand held on his belly.

I stop the doors from closing, step back out of the lift, and stand silently looking at the officers on the bridge. Peavey stops laughing abruptly, trying to cover it with a cough. Mitaka has something of the prey animal look in his eyes that he gets around Ben as he looks at me.

“I trust none of you will speak of the General’s indisposition,” I say. It isn’t a mind trick, but I let the Force wind around my words along with the authority of my position. “It is a matter of medical confidentiality, and if we discover any breaches, it will be a matter for court martial.”

Silence answers me.

“Is this understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the bridge officers answer.

I show benevolence and smile at them. “Thank you. And thank you for alerting me so promptly, Lieutenant Mitaka. The General has been wise in his choice of aide-de-camp. Please make sure no one disturbs him for the next twelve hours.”

Mitaka tries to maintain formality, but his lips tremble into a wobbly smile.

I nod once, decisively, and then get into the lift and gesture the doors closed. Ben shifts Hux’s position slightly as he holds tightly to his legs behind the knees.

“Ben, you’re not going to walk through the corridors with him like that,” I say.

“And why not?”

“ _Because_ , he is your top General, and you can’t have people seeing him like — like — _this_.”

“They’ve seen worse.”

“Ben!”

“All right, all right.” He steps over to the control panel and stops the lift. “See if you can wake him up enough so he can walk to his quarters.”

I crouch down to get at Hux’s face level. He is flopped over Ben’s shoulder as if boneless, his hands dangling.

“Armitage,” I say, putting my hand on his shoulder and shaking him. “Armitage! Wake up.”

He doesn’t wake.

“Try to stand him up,” I say.

Ben tips him off his shoulder and catches him under the arms before he can collapse into a heap on the turbolift floor. We brace him up against the lift’s wall.

“Armitage!” I say again.

He stirs a bit.

I look at Ben. “Well?”

“What do you expect _me_ to do?”

I shake Hux again, decide to try another tactic. “ _Armie._ ”

His light, feathery eyelashes flutter slightly. “I told you not to call me that, Ren,” he slurs.

I look at Ben again.

“ _What?_ ” he says.

“When did you ever call Hux ‘Armie’?”

Hux snorts, and then he opens his eyes wide, wincing in the light, pupils shrinking to pinpricks in his sea-green irises.

“Miranda?” he says, seeing me. Then he sees that Ben is holding him upright and his feet scramble for purchase on the smooth floor. “What the bloody —”

“You fell asleep on the bridge,” I say. “We’re taking you to your quarters. Can you stand?”

He nods shakily, pushing his back against the wall and putting his hands on his knees.

“Don’t start the lift just yet, though,” he says.

After a few deep breaths, he stands and adjusts his greatcoat to hang properly, tugs up his gloves, smooths down his tunic. I turn to him and push his hair back into place. I put my fingertips on his cheek where it hit the floor when he fell.

“You’ll want to put bacta on that before it bruises,” I say.

He nods again. “Thank you,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. He catches Ben’s eye. “And you too, Ren.”

Ben nods, almost imperceptibly.

We walk with Hux almost propped up between me and Ben, trying to look like we’re in one of our walk-and-talk leadership huddles, giving cursory nods to officers as we pass.

“I can’t explain it,” Hux says when we’re in his quarters. “It wasn’t even like an order; it was more like an unaccountable _mandate_ — _sleep_.”

“Your body is telling you something. Zenda’s orders — twelve hours in bed. All three of us.”

He looks at me.

“Separate beds.”

We haul him to his bedroom and onto the charcoal gray velvet duvet on the bed. I muse for a moment on how this is a happy place for me, the setting of many heady afternoons, many inconsequential conversations. Laughter. It’s been a while since any of us three had a moment like that, much less a whole afternoon.

Hux begins to protest, but is silent the moment his head is on his pillow. As ridiculously maudlin as it sounds, I love him when he is asleep, his pale, thick lashes on his cheekbones, the slackening of the tension that’s always in his body, in his face, when he’s awake. I pull his boots off and set them on the floor, then carefully take off his gloves, smooth them, and put them on his bedside table. Ben hovers awkwardly for a moment, then sits one of the sleek black leather chairs near the foot of the bed. If he catches a glimpse of my thoughts about what Hux and I have done on that chair, he makes no indication. I manage to get Hux’s greatcoat off, then unfasten his uniform belt off and tunic. I take this off, too, and lay everything on the bench at the foot of the bed.

Millicent saunters into the bedroom, crosses to rub against the Supreme Leader’s boot, and then jumps onto the bed, meowing at me to demand petting. I dutifully skritch behind her ears and stroke her smooth fur.

“Take good care of your master, Millie,” I say as I rise to leave.

She walks over to Hux, walks across his back, then back again, then lies down with her back curled up against his side.

“You seem very at home there,” Ben says as we leave Hux’s quarters. “I could feel it — you almost wished you could stay.”

“Don’t start,” I say.

“I’m not.” He lowers his head as we walk to the turbolift that goes to the level where our quarters are. “Hux is good to you.”

“He is.”

“I was afraid he wouldn’t be.”

“I remember.”

“I hated it. Feeling that fear. Feeling fear at all.”

He’s quiet then as we step into the lift, watching me. His feelings, unspoken, are of confused gratitude — for Hux not being seriously ill, for Hux himself. It’s so different from the hate that used to snap between them like electric charges a mere six months ago.

I walk over to Ben and put my head on his chest. When he puts his arms around me, his cloak envelops us. I close my eyes. He puts his lips against my hair. In our weariness, we sway.

Our level is empty, as alway. We exit the lift into a silent black corridor. Not even the mouse droids venture out when we do. We linger at the door to my quarters.

“Are we still having dinner?” he asks.

“Of course,” I say. “But given… earlier — and the doctor’s orders — perhaps we can forgo our plans prior to dinner?”

He frowns.

“You insatiable damn boy.”

“You forget,” he says. “ _I_ only have _one_ of you. Whereas you….”

“Oh?” I say. “Are you whore-shaming me? You, who brought me here to be the official courtesan of the First Order? Go change General Kreet’s assignment to the _Finalizer_ if I’m not enough for you. She’d be happy to oblige. Or have Mitaka brought up here. He’s terrified of you but he can be persuaded, I’m sure.”

He steps back from me, hands raised, as when he pretends I’ve bested him in sparring.

But I’m past the point of caring about his mock surrenders.

“And _when_ , exactly, in the past few weeks do you think I’ve had _time_ to fuck Hux?” I say. “Do you think I’m some kind of sexual vending machine, just waiting for one of you to come along and press the right button? You —”

He grabs my wrists and puts his body against mine, and as always, I am filled with the same awe and resentment at his size and his strength, the way I bend under it so willingly. He pins me up against the door of my quarters, his eyes wolf-like as he looms over me. He leans closer, and I hear the sharp intake of break as he _sniffs_ at my skin. And then his mouth is pressed on mine, hard and devouring, his teeth nipping at my lips. When he releases me, I am out of breath, and he smiles a feral smile. He lets go of my wrists.

“Meet me in the officer’s lounge at 0700,” he says, and then turns and walks down the corridor.

When the door to my quarters opens, I practically collapse inside.

“Bless me!” a suave synthetic voice intones. “Are you well, Madame?”

It’s K4, Hux’s protocol droid from the _Absolution_. He transferred her to the _Finalizer_ when we returned to it before the occupation of Coruscant and she sort of drifted into becoming my droid. She turns to me with her flat orange eyes set in matte black metal and somehow manages to look concerned.

“I’m all right, Kayfour,” I say. “Exhausted. Will you draw me a bath and lay out my dinner clothes for me? The long black shantung with the nebula embroidery, please.”

“Yes, ma’am. Only….”

“Only what?”

“If you’re exhausted, wouldn’t it be wisest to have dinner in your chambers?”

“ _Quarters_ , Kayfour, not chambers. I’m not a judge. And, yes, it _would_ be wisest, but the Supreme Leader and I are having dinner with the officers tonight.”

“Ah. Yes, ma’am. And will you be needing something in the ways of innervation?”

“No, no more stimshots, doctor’s orders. Have my hookah set up for when I come back, please. I’ll be sleeping tonight, and not to be disturbed.”

“Sleep, Madame? Oh, I’m _so_ pleased.”

“Yes, so am I. Now. That bath?”

K4 ambles away to the fresher. I sit down on my bed and take my hair the rest of the way out of its chignon. Black and wavy, it hangs nearly to my waist, and I hold its ends in my fists as I think. It’s very tempting to sink into the red velvet-covered duvet and sleep now, but I remember something.

I call Petra over my comm and ask her to connect me on a secure line to Captain Poe Dameron of the New Republic Resistance.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: 
> 
>  
> 
> _“Captain Dameron, I’m not contacting you for your famously charming banter.”_
> 
>  
> 
>  _“But you_ do _think it’s charming.”_


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Subtle palace intrigue as Mira and Ben attend dinner in the superior officer's dining hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some background information (lots of spoilers for [Putting the Damage On](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14346048/chapters/33110850)):
> 
> The assassination plot in _Putting the Damage On_ was somewhat (very) convoluted. Snoke imprinted in Hux a plan to kill Kylo Ren by passing the plot through a succession of agents who would then take a drug that wiped their memory of the plot. (Ben knew there was some kind of plot in process, but because everyone's memories were wiped, he couldn’t unravel it — which is why he brought in Mira to get information from Hux.) Petty Officer Thanisson made the mistake of enlisting the seamstress who fitted the new Supreme Leader's clothes, thinking she would have the necessary access to administer poison (via a pin). But (TWIST) this seamstress was actually Padmé Amidala, who had been hiding this whole time, having faked her own death. She wouldn't have her grandson assassinated, so she turned it around and plotted to have Hux assassinated. Mira foiled that plan by saving his life when the stormtrooper LX-6492 took a shot at him at a banquet.

### CHAPTER FOUR

#### The _Finalizer_ , Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

When he sees me, Poe puts on a smirk that makes me want to slap it off his face.

“Ah, now you look more like how I remember you!” he says. “Decided to drop the Dragon Lady thing, hunh?”

I don’t change my serious expression. I hate that name, something that sprung up in Resistance ranks after the first vids of me at my welcoming banquet leaked — the setting of the attempt on Hux’s life, and the beginning of all our woe, as John Milton may have put it. He probably would have called me a Dragon Lady, too.

“Captain Dameron, I’m not contacting you for your famously charming banter.”

“Ah, but you _do_ think it’s charming.”

That smile of his again. I ignore it.

“Circumstances have changed here. I’ll no longer be able to contact you tomorrow morning with our decision. We will postpone that call until 0500 tomorrow evening.”

He shifts in his chair, putting his elbow on a desk and leaning his cheek against his fist in mock concern. “What’s going on over there? Everything all right?”

“Yes. As I said, circumstances have changed. We have other business to attend to.”

“Brrrr,” Poe says. “Chilly for a dragon. I thought they’re supposed to breathe fire, not ice.”

“I have nothing more to say to you, Captain Dameron.”

He holds up his hands, fingers splayed. “Wait wait wait! Don’t. Miranda, I really do want to know. Is everything all right?”

I quickly skim his feelings. And then I laugh. “You think you can get me to defect.”

“What? No — we’re — we were friends, weren’t we? We were _something_ to each other. Can’t I care how you are?”

“Not without ulterior motives, you can’t,” I say. “We _were_ something to each other, but don’t forget what I am to you now.”

“And what’s that?”

“Someone who is about to be your ruler.”

It’s his turn to laugh. “We’ll see, Mireep. And we’ll talk tomorrow.”

He closes his comm. If he meant to unnerve me by calling me by his old nickname for me, he hasn’t succeeded. It was probably why Leia chose him to contact me, too — to disarm me, to make me closer to being the girl she remembers taking off Tatooine. But all Poe’s presence does is remind me of how far I’ve come, of who I am now.

Before I get up to go to my bath, I go to my jewelry box to pick out what I’ll wear. I am being Queen Consort tonight, and I intend to embody the part fully. Hux gave me a pair of tanzantium earrings for my birthday that will pick up the embroidery in my dress perfectly. As I retrieve them, I sense the presence of the kyber crystal that is in a velvet pouch buried at the bottom of the black lacquer box.

I took it from an old woman who was a member of the Church of the Force, but it was not hers, nor is it meant for me. It belongs to the girl — to Rey. I have subdued it into silence, but it’s waiting, full in the knowledge that she _will_ possess it one day. It is patient.

I take out my earrings and then close and lock the jewelry box.

* * *

I walk to the superior officer’s dining room alone. I enjoy moving through the corridors of the _Finalizer_ by myself while there’s a hum of activity around me. The thoughts of so many officers and technicians and stormtroopers used to overwhelm me, so much that I could no longer think of each person as an individual — it was just all a buzz in my head. But I’ve learned to separate the inner voices, to block out those I’m not interested in, or to simply shut everyone’s out. Feelings, though, are harder. They will always come through — probably because it’s not just my Force sensitivity that makes me pick up on them.

When I’m by myself, the feelings of those who see me aren’t affected by the presence of the Supreme Leader or the General. Once I became a familiar presence on the _Finalizer_ , the crew members’ feelings turned away from curiosity about me and turned back toward pleasing their leaders. Alone, however, I attract a kind of a sense that I am untouchable. Above the machinations and ambitions of officers, able to defy the Supreme Leader’s fits of temper, to draw laughter from the implacable General. They feel that they must please me, but it is not out of fear or loyalty to the First Order. It is something they feel for me as a person. So I smile as I pass, to show them that they _do_ please me, their impeccable uniforms and airs of crisp efficiency.

Coming down a corridor to my side, however, is someone moving at a gait a bit quicker than efficient. It’s Mitaka, his face puckered in worry.

“What is it?” I ask as he approaches.

“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but it’s the twins. They’re, ah, missing again.”

I want to be impatient with Mitaka, but it’s not his fault. Leo and Trist, outside of Hux’s watchful eye, are the imps of the _Finalizer_. We’ve found them under bunks in the stormtroopers’ barracks, in maintenance crawl spaces, sliding down officer’s level corridors on their bellies, racing mouse droids.

“Did you check the usual places?”

“All of them, yes.”

“Well, check some _new_ ones. I can’t go searching for them now, I’m due for dinner with the Supreme Leader in ten minutes.”

“But, ma’am, couldn’t you — you know, reach out… with the Force?”

Mitaka makes a kind of satellite dish shape with his hand and places it to his forehead, but slowly withdraws it when he sees my expression.

“Oh, all right,” I sigh.

I close my eyes and poke around a bit. They’ve not gone to Hux’s quarters to jump on the bed, thankfully. They’re not in the kitchens stealing pudding again. They’re… ah.

“The training arena,” I say. “They’re going at it with sparring swords. I’ll speak to them later about it, but please have someone collect them. Send Lussix. They like him.”

Thoroughly reconditioned after Ben’s grandmother used him in a plot to assassinate Hux, LX-6492 is now the most loyal of stormtroopers. Having seen the horror of what it is to betray his leader — though it was not under his own will — he is fierce in his commitment to Hux. And to me, the only person who showed him kindness and understanding — and who _believed_ him — in the fraught weeks after the attempt.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lussix can stay with them until they’re asleep to make sure they don’t escape again.” I sigh. “I suppose they’re restless. What do you think, Lieutenant?”

He looks at me, unsure why I’m making conversation with him.

“Well… There aren’t any other children on board,” he says. “General Hux has mentioned the Academy —”

“I suppose I’ll have to talk _to General Hux_ about that,” I say.

“Yes, he mentioned you were against it. But, if I may, ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“The Academy was what made me the man I am. I know I’m not… like them, but it will teach them discipline.”

“The Academy has no experience with Force-sensitive children,” I say. I hear the unintended exasperation in my voice. It’s a discussion I’ve had with Hux too many times.

“Yes, of course ma’am. I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn.”

“No, of course not, Dopheld,” I say. “You’re the General’s aide-de-camp. I value your opinion.” I smile now. “I was impressed with you since that first meeting I had here on the _Finalizer_ , when you spoke up about your idea to recruit officers to become part of a civilian government.”

He clasps his hands behind his back and looks at his boots. “I was terrified,” he says.

“Oh, so was I! But I knew I would find a kindred mind in you, I think. Not so much in Thanisson,” I add with a sly look, “and you see, my instincts are always right.”

Mitaka doesn’t blush as satisfyingly as Hux does, but the pink creeping into his cheeks pleases me just the same.

“I don’t believe — pardon me, ma’am — that you were terrified. You never seem afraid of anything.”

“Did I lessen my air of mystery?” I ask. “I’ll have to trust you not to reveal my secret.”

“Of course — I would never.”

I pause, looking at his dark, eager eyes, his young, hopeful face. Oh, he very much would like to see the Supreme Leader up close again, no matter how much the prospect frightens him.

“Leave the boys to Lussix and come with me to the superior officers’ dining hall,” I say. “Supreme Leader Ren and I are having dinner there.”

He looks momentarily stunned, poor boy. Lieutenants don’t dine in the hall with superior officers, which is for those with the rank of captain, colonel, or higher, except by special invitation.

“I would make it an order, but I have no military authority, alas,” I say, “so I am requesting it as a favor to me.”

“Of course — yes, ma’am.”

“Good! Come along.”

If I think for a moment how much Mitaka’s eager trot after me makes it seem as if I’ve just called a lively dog, I don’t dwell on it.

* * *

I’m a little late, and Ben is standing at the door of the dining hall, waiting for me. He looks, frankly, awful. He’s showered and changed, but the hollows under his eyes are even more pronounced, and his lips lack their usual high color. I probably would look much the same bare-faced. But I’ve hidden my exhaustion as best I can under makeup. Ben frowns when he sees Mitaka.

“The twins,” I whisper to Ben, knowing I don’t have to explain.

His physical presence is heavy, as always, when I lean toward him. The heat of his body through his tunic and cloak, the still-lingering scent of sex on his skin.

 _You make my cunt hurt,_ I think to him, and the corner of his mouth twitches slightly.

Aloud, I say to Mitaka, “There’s a free seat at the head of General Hux’s table, since he’s staying in his quarters tonight. Why don’t you sit in for him?”

Mitaka looks lost. “Oh, I couldn’t — it isn’t my place —”

He stops short as Ben steps forward toward him.

“Are you defying —“” Ben’s voice is dangerously impatient, but he pauses and breathes deeply when I put my hand on his arm. “Lieutenant Mitaka, please respect Chief Counselor Galan’s request,” he says, now sounding artificially courteous.

Mitaka blinks. “Yes, Supreme Leader.”

We go in together, arm-in-arm, with Mitaka trailing a few befuddled steps behind us. Our presence in the dining hall wasn’t previously announced, so the officers inside are taken by surprise for a moment, but the muscle memory of their training soon takes over. They stand at attention, ready to salute if the Supreme Leader approaches them. But Ben simply waves his hand in a gesture for them to be at ease.

The senior officers’ dining hall is no more luxurious than most of the _Finalizer,_ but instead of the motivational propaganda posters found in the troopers’ mess halls, the durasteel walls are hung with First Order banners, and instead of long tables and benches, there are rectangular tables arrayed around a small round one. Each table is headed by a high-ranking officer. The center table is the Supreme Leader’s, set every night, unused every night.

Until tonight.

It’s the first time I’ve ever sat at it. When I eat in the dining hall, I am always at Hux’s table, sitting at his right, allowing our knees to touch, our fingertips to brush against each others’.

For all his Kylo Ren ferocity, the way he stalks the corridors, or growls with outright annoyance in meetings with officers, Ben’s upbringing as the son of a senator, of a princess — as a hereditary prince himself — surfaces when he finds it appropriate. So he holds out his arm for me to take and we make the rounds in the room.

Officers were clustered in small groups when we entered, conversing while they awaited the first course, and we move among them, me greeting them by name, Ben with silent nods.Leia used to nudge him in such situations, to remind him to say the proper words, _Good evening, so good to see you_. But for the Supreme Leader, a moment of eye contact, a slight inclination of the head — those carry more weight than words could. He is known and unknown at the same time. Even the sound of his voice is rare. There are some here who have never heard it.

I tell the officers at Hux’s table that Mitaka will be sitting in for the General, and an air of raised eyebrows sweeps through the room.

“The General is staying in his quarters tonight,” I explain, “and we thought it a good opportunity for everyone to better make the acquaintance of his new aide-de-camp.”

The _we_ that I have used is ambiguous, as it usually is. Does it refer to Hux and myself? Supreme Leader Ren and myself? All three of us? Or myself alone, a royal _we_ that I shouldn’t feel entitled to use? What does today's elevation of Mitaka mean for the future? Is he a new favorite? And a new favorite of _whom_? The Chief Counselor? The Supreme Leader? _Both?_ Their questions swirl around me. It’s a satisfying feeling.

Captain Illstrum is the first to broach the subject of the absent general. She’s a plain woman, past forty, one I could disdain as mousy if not for her sharp mind and resonant voice. She has no particular will toward me; her desires are for information, for insight — anything to make her a better officer.

“General Hux must be working particularly diligently on his present special project,” she says.

She’s testing my knowledge. The General always has his special project on top of his regular duties — Starkiller Base being the most infamous, but there was also hyperspace tracking. He’s also been directing development of new armor incorporating cortosis for defense against lightsabers and training simulations for combat with Force-using opponents with Ben, Captain Asha, and myself. But Illstrum is trying to find out about another project — she doesn’t even know if one exists, but she’s probing.

How foolish of her to think she can hide what she’s doing. But she’s wasting her time.

Hux’s special project now is the design of a new weapon to destroy the planet Byss. Snoke’s secret site of medical experimentation, formerly the home of the Emperor, it’s so corrupted by the dark side that none of us could go near it without being corrupted ourselves.

But he was supposed to put that project aside during Coruscant operations. I sense now, though, that he has _not_.

I smile with the expression of indulgent pride I use in regards to Hux, and say, “Yes, we all know how committed to continually strengthening the First Order the General is. I will pass on your compliments, Captain.”

I look at her for a moment, and when I am satisfied that I have impressed upon her the inequality of our positions, I nod and move on.

Her tone when she says, “Thank you, Counselor,” tells me she understands: I may speak to General Hux in private, access that she will never have.

And I will _have_ to speak to General Hux in private. Because I realize now, that Illstrum has happened upon a truth by instinct. I’ve been too wrapped up in my own exhaustion to realize that Hux’s isn’t just from the work I know about but because of something he’s trying to keep secret, at least for the time being. He knows he can’t keep secrets from Ben and me for very long. And this means he’s come up with something to destroy Byss he thinks we will disapprove of or something he thinks is so fabulously clever that he wants to revel in his own ingenuity without sharing it with anyone else for a time. Or both.

This passes between Ben and me. _Another one of Hux’s secret projects._ The last one was a plot to kill Ben — though, really, that was more Snoke’s plan than Hux’s. We smile slightly at each other as our eyes make the briefest of contact.

These glances have been prop vid fodder for months, with the gossip shows dubbing them “The Look.” The hosts debate what we must be thinking and even invent and act out ridiculous conversations that send me into so much laughter that Ben once barged into my quarters because he was so confused by my signature in the Force. Vice Ganda, my favorite host on _Galaxy Insider_ , plays my part, and he has my propvid mannerisms down perfectly.

There are no holodrones recording us tonight, however. Ben is more relaxed without them, and once we sit down to eat, he takes in the room around us — the 200 or so superior officers having their dinner at this shift. They’re all waiting for him to pick up his spoon and start eating the squash soup that serving droids have placed in front of us.

But Ben is oblivious to that. His gloved hands are resting lightly on the tabletop and he is scrutinizing each officer. I put my hands on my lap and wait. I see now that the First Order wheel is etched into the black surface of the small round table. It’s on the plates, too, silver outline on white.

After another moment, I whisper, “Supreme Leader.”

Ben’s eyes shift to me, dropping the intensity from his perusal of his officers’ states of mind.

“They want to start eating.”

His eyes register confusion.

“They won’t start eating until you do.”

Wordlessly, he picks up his spoon, dips it into his soup, and then brings it to his mouth. There’s collective relief in the hall as everyone begins to eat.

“Ridiculous,” Ben says to me in a low voice, so no one can hear. “Everyone waiting for me like they’re children who need permission.”

“They _do_ need permission. They’re in the presence of the Supreme Leader. There’s protocol.”

“What if I didn’t want soup?” he says, almost petulantly. “Would we all sit here until I had the droids clear away the bowls?”

“Yes. Unless you understood that others wanted soup and you decided to have at least a spoonful for their sake.”

He sighs impatiently.

“This is what power _is_ ,” I say. “Your actions guide _everything.”_

 _Your mother taught you that,_ I want to say, and Ben’s look at me tells me I don’t have to.

I start in on my own soup. Just like all the food on the _Finalizer_ — save the stormtrooper rations, which in my opinion aren’t properly food at all — it’s palatable, but missing some essential, unidentifiable element that would make it truly good. It’s food made by formula rather than recipe. No one else notices. They’ve never eaten anything like the squash and coconut milk stew that I made on my gas stove in my Gaian bungalow for Ben and Hux — laced with garlic, scented with bay leaf, salted to taste, and served on rice.

What else in their lives is like this — just a step removed from an authentic experience? They don’t even know the difference. Next to me, Ben’s hand tightens on his spoon as he feels it — the way I pour into the darkness that is part of my presence in the Force what will keep it from eclipsing the light — compassion. For Mitaka, for Illstrum, for all these officers who come so close to experiencing life and never know that they have fallen short.

For Hux, asleep in his quarters, who has come closer than all of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vice Ganda is a real-life television host in the Philippines. I thought he deserved to be in the _Star Wars_ universe, so I included him as a host of _Galaxy Insider_ — a gossip show that is, through the machinations of the Ministry of Information, unwittingly a conduit for First Order propaganda.
> 
> Next chapter:
> 
>  
> 
> _“Two weeks?” Hux says, incredulous. “Have you noticed, Doctor, that there is a war going on? And we’ve only been back on the Finalizer for eight weeks after spending two weeks on Gaia. Surely that counted as rest and relaxation.”_
> 
>  
> 
> _“Didn’t you three proclaim a First Order occupation while you were there? And meet with the Gaian ambassadors? And fight a skirmish with Resistance-aligned terrorists and rescue six children from those same terrorists?”_
> 
>  
> 
> _“Yes,” Hux says weakly, “but there was also… a party?”_


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Zenda gives her orders, and the triumvirate make plans to follow them.

### CHAPTER FIVE

#### The _Finalizer_ , Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

I wake up ravenous — and naked, having apparently fallen asleep with my hookah before I could get into my pajamas — and discover that Ben is sitting up next to me in my bed, reading from his datapad. He’s wearing black pajama pants and nothing else, and his hair fans over his face.

“I ordered breakfast for you,” he says, not looking at me. “And I already ate mine.”

I roll over, looking for the clock. It seems that I knocked it off my bedside table in the night. “Thank you and good morning to you too. What are you doing in here? Zenda ordered twelve hours of sleep for both of us.”

“Yeah,” he says. “And you slept for fourteen. It’s past 1200.”

“ _Fourteen?_ Suns, why didn’t you wake me up?”

“I tried. You punched me and threw the chronometer across the room.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugs. “You were asleep, so it didn’t hurt.”

Without yet sitting up, I call out for my comm system to connect me to Hux.

Ben frowns. “Really, you’re calling _him_.”

Hux’s projected image appears on my nightstand. He’s sitting on his blue sofa in his quarters, already in uniform, though his tunic is not yet fastened. His hair still lies loose on his forehead, and he holds a cup of tea.

“Yes, Miranda?” he says, and then he frowns as Ben leans over my shoulder to peer at him. “You’re calling me from your bed. With the Supreme Leader.”

“Armitage, come to my quarters,” I say, stretching out onto my stomach and propping my chin in my hands. “Doctor Zenda wants to run some tests on all of us, and it’ll be faster if she doesn’t have to go all over the ship.”

“And you didn’t think we could all simply go to the medbay?” Hux asks. He takes a sip of his tea.

“I have no intention of putting on a uniform today,” I say. “There are matters to discuss, but I can do that just as well in  something comfortable as in itchy gaberwool.”

Even at this small size, I can see Hux’s upper lip curl slightly. “Such decadence.”

“Anyway, it looks like you’re almost ready,” I say. “Be here in twenty minutes.”

The sneer is fully realized now. “Should I say _Yes, ma’am_?”

I pull myself up to sitting and Hux’s eyes widen slightly as he takes in my bare body. “It makes no difference to me,” I say. “So long as you’re here.”

I close the comm. Ben leans over and wraps his arms around me, resting his chin on my shoulder. He hasn’t shaved, and his stubble scratches at my skin.

“You are cruel,” he says.

“I’m no such thing. I am adept at using whatever means of persuasion I have. It’s why you hired me for this job.”

He hums a little in amusement, going back to his datapad. “That reminds me, have your recent credit transfers reflected the raise that came along with your new title?”

“They have, actually. Twenty-five percent — more than I expected.”

“And you’re worth every decicredit.”

I pick up my pillow and toss it at his head. “Go get dressed.”

He gets up as I head to the fresher. I am still not used to these moments — so mundane in their domesticity. We’re a couple waking up in the same bed, talking about breakfast and finances.

Here on the _Finalizer_ , most of the time we are conducting First Order business in our offices, in uniform, in the voices we use for talking about battles and galactic policies, calling each other _Counselor_ and _Supreme Leader_. In the presence of anyone but Hux or Ben’s grandmother, we never use each others’ first names. We compartmentalize. It is necessary.

Because Ben Solo isn’t Ben Solo, though that may be how I think of him. He is Kylo Ren; he is the Jedi Killer; he is the Supreme Leader. But if I am to be who I am to him in private, as well as the woman standing publicly by his side as consort, I have to pretend. I have to keep safe that precious shard of his shattered identity that is Ben Solo — because my hatred for Kylo Ren is as strong as my desire for him.

I send a message requesting Dr. Zenda to attend to us in my quarters in a half-hour and contemplate what our reply to Leia should be as I brush my teeth and step into the sonic shower. K4 saunters over when I emerge, telling me my breakfast has arrived and that she’s laid out the dress I requested last night. I don’t remember asking for any particular dress last night, but, then, I returned from dinner incandescent with sparkling wine and exhaustion, and then apparently smoked a bowl of hashish.

It’s a simple dress, long black crepe, cinched at the waist with a belt embroidered with my dragon, deep-V neck, elbow-length sleeves that hide the tattoo of poppies running down my upper right arm. Ben’s grandmother made it for me, as she made all of my wardrobe here on the _Finalizer_. Even after I learned that she’s my idol Padmé Amidala, not the formidable Madame Sten, she’s continued to make my clothes — or at least design them and delegate the sewing to her staff, newly recruited from Naboo just for the purpose.

Hux and Ben are in my sitting room when I come out to eat. They’re in the plush red velvet arm chairs, turned to be nearly side-by-side, talking in low voices about whatever it was that Ben was reading on his datapad this morning. I pause to take in the sight — Hux’s head with his sleek burnished copper hair tipped toward the dark mass of Ben’s waves and curls, which he’s partially bound up in a messy topknot. Their knees nearly touch, and both of them hold onto the datapad as they gesture at the screen.

I sit down across the room on a chaise near the coffee table where my breakfast tray is, not interrupting them. I don’t feel like getting involved in a First Order conversation just yet anyway. I start in on my pastries and K4 hurriedly walks over to pour my tea.

My door chimes, and I get up and answer it myself, despite K4’s protests about proper protocol.

“If you thought having me do your examinations here would be more convenient for me, you were mistaken,” Zenda says as she enters, a medical droid trailing behind her. “Three separate turbolifts, special security clearances, people rushing around to file reports like their lives are at stake.”

“Well, here you are,” I say, gesturing her inside. “Thank you for accommodating us.”

“And what choice did I have, hmm?”

She walks in and motions for the medical droid to set her medkit next to my breakfast tray. Without any warning, she takes out a hypodermic wand, takes hold of my right arm, and presses it into the crook of my elbow. I watch as it fills with blood.

“Well, would you look at these,” Zenda says, examining the tattoos in High Galactic script on my forearms. The right one reads _There is a light that never goes out_ , the left _Noli me tangere._ And then she sees the lines of faint scars beneath them, and her curiosity turns to understanding. “You usually keep these covered with your uniform or long gloves, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I say.

She examines the bruises in the shape of Ben’s fingers around my wrists. “And these?”

I shrug. “A normal consequence of consensual _extracurricular activities_ ,” I say, feeling too arch to blush this time.

Zenda shakes her head, but then releases my arms and pats my hand. “All right. General, Supreme Leader — if you could please set down your war games for a moment and come here?”

Hux and Ben obey like padawans at the Temple. With just a nod, she directs them to take off their tunics and roll up their shirt sleeves, then takes their blood without a word. She snaps the three vials into some sort of analyzer, and while it does its work, she sits me down.

“I could have brought a privacy screen for the examinations, but I assume none of you are overly modest around each other,” Zenda says.

I blush, and she shakes her head. “My, my — an automatic somatic response to emotional stimulus, despite everything. That reminds me — you are due for a full physical, Counselor. It’s regulation for everyone to receive one upon coming onboard the _Finalizer_ , and you never have.”

“Oh,” I say, as she begins to massage under my throat with her wizened brown fingers, “of course.”

“Your lymph nodes are swollen — probably some virus going around the ship, and your immune system is doing its damnedest to keep you healthy even though you’re not giving it any help by running yourself into the ground. I’ll give you an antiviral injection, but some bug or other will catch up with you soon if you don’t make a change. Open.”

She peers into my mouth with her penlight, then directs me to unzip my dress so she can attach the various sensors of her portable analyzer onto my skin. One she applies to my temple.

“Elevated heart rate,” she murmurs. “Blood pressure… well, best not think about that, but we have to, don’t we? All right, get dressed.” She pops all the attachments off me with a quick flick of her wrist. “Next up?”

She examines Hux next, then Ben, making disapproving clucking noises about their vital signs the whole time. It’s astounding to see, the way she handles the two most powerful men in the galaxy — directing the General to say “aaah,” commanding the Supreme Leader to open his shirt. Equally fascinating is their willingness to obey. Doctor Zenda could rule the galaxy easily, I’m sure. Isn’t it lucky for us she doesn’t want to.

When she looks at the blood analysis results she shakes her head.

“Just as I thought, shocking.”

She looks down at us as we sit meekly on the chaise in front of her. Hux is flushed with humiliation, his nostrils flared, indignant. Ben is impatient, simmering, chin tucked. I want to laugh at our own chastisement.

“You three are young people in excellent physical condition and health, but right now you are, in my medical opinion, a mess. Stress hormones, blood pressure, brain activity — none of them are as they should be.”

“A ‘mess,’” Hux says primly. “Is that an official diagnosis?”

Zenda narrows her eyes at him. “Yes, General, it is,” she snaps. “I could write out full reports on each of you, but there’s no point. You three need rest or you’re going to crash and take the First Order down with you.”

“Yes, well,” Hux says. “We all got our rest last night, and as I’m sure the Supreme Leader and Counselor have made clear, we simply don’t have time —”

“General Hux,” Zenda interrupts, “you are of course aware that as Chief Medical Officer I am empowered to give medically mandated orders to anyone on board, including _all_ officers, no matter what their rank.”

Hux rankles at this. “If I object, you will have to present your case to High Command.”

“And do you think High Command will take your side on this?” Zenda raises one of her fine, dark eyebrows at him. “If you follow my orders without appealing to them, I am not obliged to inform them of my orders, as it’s a matter of medical privacy.”

Hux is silent. The graybeard Imperial holdovers are chafing for the opportunity to push him, a young upstart, out of they way and conduct the First Order the way they see fit. For a moment he muses that he simply could have Zenda executed for insubordination, but when he sees my expression, he first chafes at my intrusion and then resigns himself.

“So then what are your orders,” Ben growls at Zenda.

She refuses to be intimidated. “Complete cessation of all duties, rest and relaxation in a place removed from any First Order star ship or military installation, for a period not shorter than… two weeks.”

“Two _weeks_?” Hux says, incredulous. “Have you noticed, Doctor, that there is a _war_ going on? _And_ we’ve only been back on the _Finalizer_ for eight weeks after spending two weeks on Gaia. Surely that counted as rest and relaxation.”

“Didn’t you three proclaim a First Order occupation while you were there? And meet with the Gaian ambassadors? And fight a skirmish with Resistance-aligned terrorists and rescue six children from those same terrorists?”

“Yes,” Hux says weakly, “but there was also… a party?”

Zenda sighs. “Two weeks,” she says. “I expect confirmation of your plans by tomorrow afternoon. And for stars’ sake, let your aides handle the logistics.”

Next to me, the intensity of Ben’s frustration is coming off of him in hot waves. “This is _not_ a good time,” he says through clenched teeth.

“As I told Counselor Galan yesterday, _you_ decide when a good time is. You hold all the power now,” Zenda says, pointing to direct the medical droid to gather up the equipment.

She nods at the three of us and then crosses to the door with her droid, K4 following solicitously to see them out.

Ben, Hux, and I sit for a moment to collect our thoughts. A plan begins to form in my mind. Ben senses it, giving me a dubious look.

Finally, Hux picks up his tunic and puts it back on, pacing the room as he fastens it.

“Ren told me about the little proposal Dameron presented to you on behalf of General Organa,” he says, pausing by the window to gaze into space.

“Of course you know accepting it is ludicrous,” he continues, turning back toward me.

“Do I?” I say.

“Mira, I spent the morning looking at the projections for the Resistance’s’ resources,” Ben says. “We may have lost a third of our personnel and ships with the destruction of the _Supremacy_ ” — as always, he pronounces the word like profanity — “but they have less than a tenth of their former strength. Like I said, they’re in no place to ask for terms.”

“They’re not,” I agree. “I know that. But what if we were to offer them anyway? An act of mercy.”

From the window, Hux barks out a laugh. “ _Mercy_? I’m sorry, has your exhaustion put you under the delusion that the First Order is some kind of Messianic religious cult?”

“Mercy can only be offered by those in a position of power,” I reply. “Its use is an act of dominance.”

Hux locks his hands behind his back and narrows his eyes. “Go on,” he says. “What is your plan for using this act of dominance?”

“We declare a ceasefire,” I say. “A two week cessation of hostilities to prepare for a peace summit.”

“ _Peace summit_ ,” Hux repeats with a sneer.

“We won’t accept the terms as Dameron laid them out. You’re both right — they’re in no position to ask that of us. Instead, talks will be held on neutral ground, outside of the Core, with all three of us present.”

Ben’s eyebrows rise as my plan becomes clearer in both our minds.

“What neutral ground?” Hux asks impatiently. “I can see from the way you’re making eyes at each other that you both already know.”

“The Regency Worlds,” I say. “Empress Leeya has been so insistent on neutrality that it’s almost an obsession. She’ll be honored for her realm to be chosen, if the right person were to present the plan.”

Hux’s lips tremble. “Which of the Regency Worlds?”

I stand and walk over to him. I put my hands on his chest, feeling it rise and fall with his breath.

“Arkanis,” I say.

He breathes in sharply. His hands fall out of their clasp behind his back to fall at his sides. I take them in mine. The tremble in his lips turns into the faint hint of a smile, and he leans into me as if for a kiss. But then, remembering Ben is in the room, he withdraws. But I feel Ben’s interest piqued behind me, a suppressed stirring in him.

“You bewitching creature,” Hux breathes. “You almost made me believe it possible.”

I furrow my brow. “It _is_ possible.”

“Miranda, please.” His eyes cloud. “My home world will never be accepted as neutral ground.”

“You haven’t been there since you were a child, Armitage — more than thirty years. The Resistance can’t suppose that Arkanis owes you any particular allegiance. Besides, the Resistance isn’t in any position to refuse, and we can go to Arkanis even if they _do_ refuse.” I turn to Ben. “Can’t we?”

I know his answer from the way he looks at me — he is in no mood to refuse me anything I want.

“Well, then, it’s settled,” I say to Armitage. “We’ll find a nice old manor house on Arkanis, and spend two weeks  wandering through corridors and roaming through the heather on ‘silent, misty moors,’ or whatever you have there. We’ll take the twins, and let them go feral — they need it.”

Hux gazes over my shoulder back into the stars.

“There are moors,” he says. “I remember. And beaches where the sand, the sky, and the sea are all shades of gray. I remember standing on a balcony, watching the waves. But I never went out on the beach. I used to imagine what the sand would feel like under my feet.”

I smile. “Leave it to the ocean to bring out the hidden poetic depths in Armitage Hux.”

He bows his head and nods. I go back to my breakfast tray and start in on my pastries again.

“Kayfour,” I say, “my tea’s gone cold. Would you please reheat it?”

The matte black droid turns from where she has been busying herself arranging the cushions next to my viewing window. “ _Reheat_ it? Oh, no, that will never do. I’ll make you a new pot, Counselor.”

“Really, that’s not —”

But K4 comes over and whisks away the pot, murmuring to herself. Ben watches me eat for a time and then rubs his eyes with his broad hands.

“You said the plan would have to be presented by the right person,” he says. “What do you mean?”

“Empress Leeya is a snob, that’s all there is to it. I won’t do — I’m a grasping courtesan. Nor will Armitage — he’s a bastard.”

At the window, Hux stiffens.

“The proposal will have to come from you, Ben — you’re the son of a princess, after all.”

“If I may, Counselor,” K4 says, carrying over a new pot of hot water, “protocol dictates that there should be a go-between from a Regency World to introduce the proposal.”

Hux turns from the window. “I think I know just the person, loath as I am to mention her.”

Ben groans. “Hux, I swear, if you mean —”

“Carise Sindian,” Hux says.

Ben groans again.

“Wasn’t she disgraced after… after…” _After revealing your grandfather was Darth Vader_ , I don’t say.

“Yes, but Empress Leeya thinks it was a grave injustice,” Hux says, leveling his gaze at Ben. “And why not — to punish a woman for speaking the truth, stuffy rules of old noble families be damned. And won’t the Resistance hate that they have no choice but to accept a summit shepherded by the person responsible for exposing their precious leader’s darkest secret?”

Ben looks away, his emotions stacking on top of each other, one after another. Anger at what was kept from him, resignation to what the knowledge has done to him — but the pride of his ancestry still runs through every thought, like a sinuous black cord, along with the fear of his own inadequacy, his belief he’ll never be as powerful as his forebear.

I wasn’t with him when he learned the truth. I had returned to Tatooine nearly two years before because of my mother’s illness, and I stayed after her death. I’d taken over running my mother’s little shop that served passing traders. I wasn’t very good at it. Twelve years at the at the Temple had educated me for another life. I was a Jedi, but I was painfully naïve after that sheltered existence. I longed for the security of my teacher and my friends, and I missed Ben desperately. He had not replied to any of my holomessages — which I didn’t know he had never received, thanks to Snoke’s interference.

So when Leia sent word she was going to visit, I was elated. I had made up my mind to close the shop and return with her to Chandrila. But when she arrived, accompanied by her protégé Poe Dameron, she was grave and gaunt, and her despair poured out of her into her presence in the Force like water.

“All right,” Ben says, turning back toward the room. “Hux, you contact Carise Sindian and explain what we require. She’ll want something in return. If she wants credits, give her whatever she asks for. Anything else, inform me. Mira, please tell Officer Sloane and Lieutenant Mitaka to come to my office in a half-hour. We'll brief them, and then you’ll present the plan to Captain Dameron.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The party Hux mentions is in [Chapter 24 of _Putting the Damage On_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14346048/chapters/34681388#workskin).
> 
> Next chapter:  
>  _“And for whose benefit was that performance, Miranda?” Hux asks, standing over me, his breath coming fast._
> 
> _“The First Order’s,” I say._
> 
> _“You enjoyed it,” he accuses._
> 
> _“Indeed,” I reply. “And don’t you enjoy carrying out your duties for the Order?”_
> 
> _“My duties don’t entail debasing myself for rebel scum.”_
> 
> _He puts his gloved hand on my cheek, thumb on my lips as I smirk derisively at him. From behind, though, Ben’s hand closes around Hux’s bare wrist._
> 
> _“Hux,” he says, standing — his voice low, dangerous._


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another holocall with Poe Dameron has unexpected results.

### CHAPTER SIX

#### The _Finalizer_ , Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

After we brief Petra and Mitaka, we go to my quarters to prepare for the holocall. Hux wasn’t able to reach Carise Sindian — though he’s sure that her unavailability is a ploy to make him wait on her.

We take our lunch sitting on the cushions in front of the viewing window. The detente between Ben and Hux has relaxed into almost a camaraderie, but with something more intimate to it. Despite that — or perhaps because of it — I still feel the tension between them, a string stretched taut. _If you would only move closer together,_ I want to say.

They would see that something binds them together besides their trauma, besides the hate that it produced — my love. My love for both of them.

I lie down, looking at the scene of war outside.

Coruscant is below, both dark and glittering. The fleet of star destroyers is arrayed around the _Finalizer_ , which is the tip of the spear. It’s quiet for once, no cannon fire at smugglers, no TIE fighters dogfighting as a reminder to those below of our presence.

I’m unaccountably nervous about the call to Poe Dameron. He’s been too familiar with me, and though I know I can withstand it and even use his reminders of my past — _our_ past, to be honest, as brief as our _liaison_ , as Hux calls it, was — to strengthen my resolve, I don’t exactly look forward to handling his banter with Ben and Hux in the room. Ben interrogated him at Starkiller Base, and he’s been Hux’s bête noir for years.

I look over my notes for the hundredth time and then fall asleep at some point, awakening when K4 comes in to inform us of the time.

“I still say this call should be made from a less intimate location,” Hux is saying to Ben. “It’s _inappropriate_ to conduct official business from private quarters. Especially _these_.”

Hux, who like Ben, prefers clean lines and precision in his decor, gestures at my sitting room — its rugs and hanging colored glass lamps, its chaise longues and velvet armchairs.

“Oh, Miranda,” he says when he sees that I’ve woken up. “How nice of you to join us.”

“Suns, Armitage,” I say, sitting up and stretching. “You’re in a mood. Stop it before I tell Dr. Zenda. This is the perfect location for this call. I have a plan.”

I call over the little floating holocam, and it follows me as I arrange myself on the chaise.

“You’re not going to be in uniform?” Hux asks disapprovingly.

I am still wearing the dress I put on this morning, and my hair is loose — I think of what Leia would have said about _that_.

“As I said, I have a plan. It will be discomfiting for him to see me like this.”

Ben frowns. “And why is that?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I say. He immediately tries to scan my thoughts, but I put up a wall just as quickly. He could get past it, if he wanted to, but he won’t violate this particular boundary.

Hux smirks, which makes Ben frown more deeply.

“Both of you stand behind me, out of range of the cam. You can join the discussion later if it seems appropriate.”

“Miranda, this is —” Hux begins.

“Sshh,” I say. I hand Ben my datapad with my notes on it. “Tell me if I’ve forgotten anything.”

He scans in quickly. “It’s fine,” Ben says. “You’re nervous. Why are you so nervous? Like you said, it doesn’t matter whether the Resistance accepts our proposal or not.”

I close my eyes and wave my hand at him. “Later.” I take a breath in. “Kayfour, open the comm to Captain Dameron, please, and then leave us — you can help Petty Officer Sloane if she needs anything.”

I put my hands on my lap. I sit up straight.

“Good evening,” Poe says when the connection opens, smiling his winning smile.

He is infuriatingly handsome, his expression confident, his posture easy. But the posture is just that. He’s put some care into how he’s appearing before me now, wearing a crisp-but-not-too-crisp white shirt and brown leather jacket with the Resistance insignia on the left sleeve instead of a rumpled orange flightsuit, and his his wavy dark hair is smooth and shining, as if newly combed into perfect place.

I take a chance and comment on how he looks. “Hello, Captain Dameron. You’ve cleaned up nicely. Is this for me?”

I can see him wanting to wink at me but stopping himself. Poe is incapable of resisting admiration from any source.

“I’ve got to look my best for you, Mireep,” he says, and behind me, still invisible to the holocam, I feel Ben and Hux exchange uneasy glances.

 _Mireep?_ The glance says.

I move to silence Hux, but I’m too late.

“Captain Dameron,” he says, stepping into range of the cam, painfully imperious in his uniform and stiff posture. It’s impossible not to compare him to Poe’s casual grace. “Your insolence does not speak well for the prospect of opening negotiations.”

“General!” Poe exclaims. He squints, and I realize Ben has stepped up as well. “ _And_ Kylo Ren. If I knew this was going to be a party, I’d’ve pitched in credits for a keg. Or is this a BYOB kind of situation? I don’t have _my_ general and rock-floater at hand, but maybe I could rustle them up in a pinch.”

He raises his eyebrows at me. At the allusion to Leia and the girl, Rey, Ben stiffens next to me, his breath drawn in sharply through his nose. I ignore the bait.

“Poe, I never knew you to be someone who is self-conscious about what he’s lacking _,_ ” I say. “I can send the General and Supreme Leader out if they make you feel _inadequate_.”

His dark eyes harden for a fraction of a second, but then he bursts into honest laughter.

“Touché, Mireep — _Chief Counselor Galan_ that is — or should I take your use of my first name as a certain license for familiarity?”

The way his tongue taps the back of his teeth on the last syllable is almost obscene. I smile at him now.

 _Mira, what the fuck is this_ , Ben thinks to me.

 _Trust me,_ I reply.

“All right, Poe,” I say. “Like you said, there’s enough formality around here in the First Order, so let’s get to it. Coruscant as a location for negotiations is not an option. The Supreme Leader and General Hux not being present is not an option.”

Poe’s eyebrows draw together, but he tries to maintain his casual demeanor. “Miranda, those were our only preconditions — how can we enter into talks in good faith if you won’t even agree to those?”

I smile. “Poe, I’m sure you see that every advantage is with us. We don’t have to concede anything. If Leia” — and here I hear Ben’s breath again — “wants to end the war without more bloodshed, she’ll accept _our_ conditions. _All_ utilities will fall under First Order control, and we will choose a neutral system for the location of a summit to figure out how the Resistance will be dissolved and its members incorporated into civilian life. This would be a first step toward the complete dissolution of the New Republic, and that will be communicated to the Senate, if it could be called that in its current state.”

Poe doesn’t say anything immediately. He regards me with his dark eyes, scanning back and forth, up and down, as if taking my measure.

“Come on now, Poe,” I say, making my tone caressing. “You and I know all too well when to put a line under something and say it’s over. The war is over. It’s up to the Resistance now to decide _how_ that end comes.”

He nods, still not speaking, and casts his eyes away from me.

“Do you remember what you said to me when you left me on Gaia?”

He looks back up. “Yes. I said, ‘Stay safe.’”

“ _By any means necessary_ ,” I add. “What I’m doing now — this is the means by which I keep myself, and the people I care about, safe. And it’s how I’m going to keep _your_ people safe, too, if you agree to it.”

“ _You_ are going to keep _my_ people safe?” he says, his tone rising. “Why should we trust the First Order to do that? We could be walking into an ambush! Not a year ago, General Hux was proclaiming that he would obliterate the New Republic from the galaxy.”

I glance at Hux. He’s sat down in an armchair, but he’s gone stiff with indignation, his gloved hands clutching his knees.

“Poe, I say. You’re not talking to Hux now. You’re talking to me. Can you trust me? I trusted you with something precious once. Do you think I could forget that? Do you think I would repay it with betrayal?”

Poe licks his lips, slowly, His eyes shift from me to Ben.

“She’s always been like this, hasn’t she?” he says to him, shaking his head, disarmingly personal with the most feared person in the galaxy, someone he witnessed order the deaths of unarmed people, who cleaved his mind to extract information. “You just can’t say ‘no’ to her.” He sighs. “All right, Miranda. I’ll talk to the general and we’ll figure this out.”

“We’ll contact you at 0900 tomorrow.”

“You’re not gonna break our date this time, are you?”

“Oh, you know me. I always offer a raincheck.”

He smirks. “Just can’t resist seeing me again, can you?”

“Who knows, if Leia agrees to our proposal, I just might get to see you in person again.”

Poe chuckles. “As you always were, Mireep.”

“Until tomorrow, Poe,” I say, and close the comm.

Ben and Hux are silent. Ben is practically seething next to me, but he’s trying to conquer his confusion. After a moment, Hux stands and steps close to me, his lip curled in contempt. I feel in his agitation something else — and so does the Supreme Leader: lust.

“And for _whose_ benefit was that performance, Miranda?” Hux asks, standing over me, his breath coming fast.

“The First Order’s,” I say.

“You _enjoyed_ it,” he accuses.

“Indeed,” I reply. “And don’t you enjoy carrying out your duties for the Order?”

“My duties don’t entail _debasing_ myself for rebel scum.”

He puts his gloved hand on my cheek, thumb on my lips as I smirk derisively at him. From behind, though, Ben’s hand closes around Hux’s bare wrist.

“ _Hux_ ,” he says, standing — his voice low, dangerous.

Hux turns his attention to Ben, who keeps hold of his wrist and jerks him forward, so they are standing with their chests nearly touching, Ben’s face bent over Hux’s.

Hux exhales, and his breath ruffles Ben’s hair. The tension snaps between them. Ben inhales, and as his chest expands with it, it does touch Hux’s now. What is between them can’t be denied anymore, I feel it in their memories — in their first meeting before Snoke set them against each other.

I want to step away, to slip from the room and leave them to what has always lain between them, their history, the desire to hurt that mingles with the desire to consume — in every possible way.

But Ben looks down and catches my eye and withdraws from Hux, who lets out a breath with a quiet whimper, and then takes several steps back toward the window and turns his back to us. I stand and walk over, circling around to face him. I keep my eyes locked on Ben’s as I put my body against Hux’s. Hux shudders. I look away from Ben and put my lips, moist and willing against Hux’s mouth, languorously drawing him into a kiss.

When I release him, he opens his eyes and draws in a sudden, sharp breath. He trembles, his mind reeling against showing his desire for me, a desire that began in his want for Kylo Ren.

I begin to move away. But Ben is suddenly behind me, using his body to push me back against Hux.

“Ren,” Hux groans out. “What are you doing?”

Ben continues to push us forward, until Hux’s back is against my bedroom door, and I am pinned between them. I feel Ben’s cock harden against the small of my back, his breath hot on my neck.

My body is entirely against Hux’s now. I put my knee between his legs and feel Ben’s eyes on him as well as my own, taking him in. Ben is looking at Hux’s mouth, the pink parted lips, and then he is seeing the silver glints in Hux’s eyes.

Ben pushes harder into me, pressing my breasts against Hux’s chest. The heat between us, emanating through our clothes, is almost oppressive. Hux turns away from us as his cock hardens against my hip.

My thoughts are mingling with Ben’s, and I’m not sure which of us is practically gasping internally — _He wants us, he wants to do everything to us. He wants us to do everything to him. I want him. I want him._

But his hands are pressed back against the wall, and he won’t lift his head to meet our eyes again.

“It’s too much,” he says. “Ah, gods, I can’t — the way you both look at me — like you’re one person —”

Hux’s voice peters out into a whimper as both of us withdraw from him, the sudden rush of air between our bodies unnaturally cold. He turns slowly to look at both of us again, breathing hard, his eyes wide and glazed with desire.

He straightens. He tugs down his tunic and blinks until his gaze hardens. But his voice, when he speaks, is breathy and soft, as if he’s already succumbed to the inevitable. Just not yet.

“I… I am going to my quarters,” he says.

“Armitage,” I say, “are you —”

“I’m fine, Miranda. It’s… fine. I need a moment to… collect myself.”

He scoots away from my bedroom door and then walks out with his usual military bearing. Ben and I watch him go and then turn toward each other, warily.

He looks away first, casting his eyes down at the layered rugs on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he says, rare words coming from him. “I didn’t know I was — that was going to happen.”

“Neither did I,” I say. “I had some idea that you wanted to see me kiss him, though — that’s why I did.”

“That’s not the only reason.”

“No.”

We’re silent in the way of people who can read each other’s thoughts and emotions — that is to say, not silent at all; just not speaking. There was a surety in Ben while he was acting, while he was using his body to press me up against Hux. But now there is just as much confusion roiling in his mind as there had been in Hux’s while it was happening.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says.

He’s angry. At himself.

“Don’t,” I say, a kind of assuredness beginning to fall over me. “We’ll be fine. You’ve known what you’ve wanted, what Hux has wanted, for a long time. Both of you have. I’ve been the… some kind of proxy for it — because you weren’t ready. But you will be. Both of you.”

“This comes of you throwing us together so much, ever since we’ve been back here.”

“Don’t blame me for what was there before I got here,” I say. I feel two spots of heat spreading across my cheeks. “Just because you two couldn’t let yourselves have what you wanted.”

Ben crosses the room and throws himself down onto the cushions in front of the viewing window. He props his elbows on his knees and puts his head in his hands.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he says again. “What is this going to be, then?”

I go over to him and nudge his hands away from his face, then sit down in the hollow of his crisscrossed legs. I nestle into his chest, curling up. We’re both breathing quickly, heavily. I try to concentrate to slow the beating of my heart.

“We’ll find out,” I say. “But not yet. Not here. On Arkanis.”

“Oh, yes, Arkanis — planet of all Hux’s ridiculous fantasies.”

“You used to feel the same way about Tatooine, once,” I say. “You wouldn’t believe me about it being hot and sandy and miserable. You couldn’t even conceive of it, growing up on a paradise like Chandrila.”

“Not everything you did on Tatooine was miserable,” he says, almost archly. “I caught a bit of a memory when you were on the holocall.”

“Yes, well —”

“You fucked Poe Dameron,” he says.

“Yeah, but to be fair,” I reply, “hasn’t _everyone_?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he says. “I haven’t.”

“But you _could_ have. If you had met him then.”

Ben closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Let’s not talk about Dameron.”

“My birth planet, then,” I say. “And your fascination with it.”

“I just wanted to see where Dar — where my grandfather was from. How he lived.”

“And your uncle, too.”

He tightens his jaw and doesn’t reply right away.

“That was something you shared with him that I wasn’t part of,” he says. “I remember you laughing with him about Jawa convoys, talking about how dark it was at night. It was almost as if he was your uncle instead of mine.”

I shake my head. “You and Luke shared something I could never be part of, Tatooine or no. I don’t know what that’s like.”

He rests his cheek against the top of my head. “It always comes back to that, doesn’t it. That Skywalker legacy. It’s one of pain and failure more than anything else.”

I once watched Ben fly back from a mission in his Silencer. Under his control, it glided into the hangar like a sleek bird of prey, reverberating with the hum of its engines. His voice as he speaks of his family history has the same steady intensity, the same hint of danger.

“Have you talked to my grandmother since you were named consort?” he asks.

“Of course,” I answer. “She expects a grandchild any day now.”

He sniffs. “But, I mean, about what it’s like — to be connected to someone like me in that way.”

“When was I ever _not_ bound to you?” I ask. “Even before we ever met, before we were _born_ , the Force had plans to bring us together. There may not have been a prophecy, but so much had to happen for us to stand next each other that day at the Temple and smile at each other.”

I think of the events that led to Leia meeting my mother. The mission to save Han in Jabba the Hutt’s palace, Leia’s enslavement. Were it not for her, my mother would not have been freed, and I wouldn’t have been born. And if not for Leia knowing us, my Force sensitivity may have gone unnoticed. I would have lived my life as someone with a gift for understanding others emotions, perhaps — a good market haggler, an excellent whore — or for being nimble on my feet and with words. But I would have never become what Luke Skywalker’s training made me.

“I —” Ben begins, and then he holds me tighter against him. “I marvel every day that you let me come to you. After what I did, what I’ve become.”

For a moment, I am angry at him for reminding me. In these quiet moments, in his arms, I want him to be Ben, the boy I loved. But he always makes me acknowledge that he is not Ben; he is Kylo Ren. And I am his, and he is mine.

“‘ _Noli me tangere_ ,’” I recite, “‘for Caesar’s I am, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’”

“And I’m Caesar, I guess?” Ben has been learning some of Gaian history from me.

“Yes,” I say.

“What about the third of our triumvirate? Are you his too?”

“No,” I say. “He’s mine. I conquered him.”

Ben sighs and loosens his hold on me. It feels lonely, just for a second, not to have his arms around me, the sure safety of being possessed by him.

“You’d better go see him, then,” Ben says. “Do you feel it? He wants you to come to him.”

I reach out, languidly, and catch hold of it — Hux’s anxious desire, his need for me to calm him.

“You can trace his movements, his thoughts all over the ship, can’t you?”

“Except when you’re hiding him from me.”

“How long have you been so attuned to him?”

“A long time. Since before I even saw him when I came aboard the _Absolution_ — he was there, in my feelings. I knew our lives would get bound up together, somehow. And I hated the inevitability of it.”

Ben stands and puts his hand out to help me up. “Now go, on. He’s waiting.”

He watches while I put on my boots, and as I leave my quarters I feel a relinquishment of sorts — a feeling that Ben will never belong entirely to me again. Or perhaps a realization that he never did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Mira quotes from is the sonnet "Whoso List to Hunt" by Thomas Wyatt. It's about Anne Boleyn.
> 
> Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,  
> But as for me, hélas, I may no more.  
> The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,  
> I am of them that farthest cometh behind.  
> Yet may I by no means my wearied mind  
> Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore  
> Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,  
> Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.  
> Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,  
> As well as I may spend his time in vain.  
> And graven with diamonds in letters plain  
> There is written, her fair neck round about:  
>  _Noli me tangere_ , for Caesar's I am,  
> And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
> 
> Next chapter:
> 
> _“But Ben?” I prompt._
> 
> _Hux tosses his head back, accessing old memories. “He was afraid, damaged. Pale. Trembling, even. Haunted. No, I didn’t think much of Snoke’s new apprentice on first look, I’m afraid. And then — he fixed his eyes on me, as if he knew what I was thinking. I suppose he did know. And his lips quivered — you know how they do. He was angry and insulted, but he was also hurt. He wanted my approval somehow. I was intrigued.”_   
> 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Talking things through with Hux.

### CHAPTER 7

####  _The Finalizer_ , Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

I realize as I walk through the corridor on the superior officers’ deck that I’ve forgotten to change my clothes. As a rule, I never go to Hux’s quarters in anything but uniform — what is my version of uniform, anyway — a pretense about what our relationship is but also, frankly, because he prefers me in uniform. I smile and greet the officers whom I pass, and they make little bows of their heads that include quick skims of my appearance — my long dress, my loose hair, my bare face.

I am about to say my usual “Good afternoon” to Captain Illstrum as we pass, but she stops to speak to me.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Counselor, but is General Hux well? I saw him about a half hour ago, rushing to his quarters, and he looked very pale. And since he wasn’t at dinner yesterday —”

“General Hux is running the occupation of Coruscant, Captain Illstrum,” I say, a bit annoyed with her solicitousness about Hux. She reminds me of the Temple matron who was Leia’s friend, asking me about Ben. “He’s very preoccupied with that, I’m sure you understand.”

“If he is in need of officers to take point on particular tasks, please let him know that I and my unit are prepared to take on additional responsibilities.”

“Of course,” I say. “The General is aware of all the resources at his disposal — and of how best to use them.”

A quick flash of anger passes over Illstrum’s mild brown eyes. Her indifferent feelings about me are quickly turning toward resentment. I’m a barrier that is between her and what she wants — one that she not only cannot pass through but also that she thinks should not be there at all. I’m not of the First Order, and can’t possibly understand its intricacies, the way the gears fit together to form the machine.

This is the challenge in forming the civilian government — ostensibly what I was brought to the Order to achieve. Career officers like Illstrum will find the transition difficult to bear. So I take some pity.

“I’m sure General Hux will appreciate your initiative,” I say.

“Thank you, Counselor,” she says, warily, as if she doesn’t trust my seeming goodwill.

But when we part, she is hopeful. She is also envious of my dress — well, not really the dress itself but the fact that I’m allowed to wear it. I think of Mitaka’s suggestion of identifying officers to transition into being civilian government officials and make a note of Illstrum. Despite her her discomfort with change, perhaps I could win her over with promises of more freedom.

I manage to get to Hux’s quarters without any other officers trying to impress upon me their importance to the Order and what use General Hux might make of them. They never solicit favor with the Supreme Leader so specifically. No one is quite sure _what_ they could do for him. I am the only one on the _Finalizer_ who knows what he wants.

Hux stands from where he was sitting on his sofa when he opens his door to me. He watches me with curiously bright eyes, a flush already working its way above his uniform collar. I know from experience that this means the skin on his chest has gone over pink as well, warm to the touch, hot when my bare body presses against him.

And now I blush too, and manage a breathless “ _Armitage”_ before he has me in his arms and his mouth on mine. I almost think he’s going to carry me into his bedroom, as he did the first time, as he’s done so many times since. But he merely pulls me, gently, onto the sofa beside him, releases me from the kiss, and then buries his face in my neck, the curve where it meets my shoulder. His lips are moist against my skin as he murmurs “ _Ah gods”_ and his love for me emanates like heat. But he is overwhelmed and confused.

“I can smell him on you,” he finally whispers. “Now, I mean. Other times, a little, but especially now.” He hesitates before he speaks again. “I know I can’t keep how I feel from you, so it’s not use not saying it. I wanted him. Wanted you both.”

I feel his breath, coming faster and harder, through the fabric of my dress, against my breasts. His slender hands clutch my waist.

“And why should you want to hide it?” I ask.

He shakes his head, his forehead against my shoulder. “Let’s not talk of it now. I just need to be with you, please. Before we all gallivant off on our holiday. I need you here. In this familiar place.”

Familiarity is important to Hux. Routine. Our two o’clock trysts, when I come to his door and he pulls me inside and undresses me, his breath rising with each fastening of my uniform undone, each hairpin removed from my chignon, each time he touches his handkerchief to my mouth to wipe away my lipstick. It is a transformative act — he likes being the engineer of this change, turning me from the Chief Counselor into his lover.

“Is it all right — could I just lie down… with my head….” He rests his palm on my thigh.

“Of course.”

He lies down, resting his head on my lap. I idly stroke his coppery hair though my fingers as I think of the time I sat like this with him, on the floor of my bungalow on Gaia, surrounded by my friends and music and smoke, and we fell asleep, stoned and content and very close to being in love.

And Ben slept in my bed that night, by himself. I thought he countenanced my relationship with Hux to punish himself — for asking it of me in the first place, for all the destruction he visited on my life. But there’s something in him, that was even in him then, when he was still learning not to hate Hux, that wants Hux to be happy.

And I make him happy. The General, pliant and exhausted under my fingertips, drinking in the consolation of my touch. The ferocity of his ambition temporarily subdued in a kind of love-drunkenness.

“Give yourself as much time as you need,” I say. “Ben isn’t going to push anything. He feels bad for… doing that without either of us being prepared.”

“You seemed prepared enough. When you both put your mind to the same task you’re fairly terrifying, if you didn’t know.”

I shrug and he adjusts his head on my lap, pressing his cheek on my thigh.

“I’ve been meaning to to ask you — why do you call him Ben?” he asks. “I understand your history, of course, but would expect you’d have adjusted by now.”

I know what he means, but I pretend to be glib. “I call him Ben for the same reason he calls me Mira.”

“But Mira is your name. Ben isn’t his, is it? Not anymore.”

“I can’t call him the name Snoke gave him. I can’t call him Kylo Ren. ”

 _But you did_ , my thoughts tell me.

“I suppose I want to remind him of he used to be, too,” I say, reluctantly. I feel like I’m speaking of something too intimate to be shared, even with Hux. “To keep that little part of him that is still Ben Solo alive. He can call me Mira because I still am Mira. I deserve to have Ben Solo. I loved him for so long.”

“You’re like a cat,” Hux says. “Just doing what you think you deserve.”

But he nuzzles my leg, kisses my knee, and sighs. We sit quietly for a moment. As if to assert her superior cat-ness, Millie strolls in and hops onto the sofa with us. She nudges her way to sharing my lap with Hux.

“What were you two like, when you first met?” I ask. I’m alternating between petting Millie and Hux’s hair. “The very first time you ever saw each other?”

Hux is quiet for a moment. I realize that this is like him asking about Ben’s name. It is personal, secret.

“I don’t know what I was _like_. The way I am now. I was twenty-eight, a colonel, impatient to be assigned to the _Supremacy_.” He shakes his head. “What an act of hubris building that cursed ship was. But I thought it indestructible. That gives you some idea of what I was like — very sure of myself, not yet tested by any real adversity since leaving the Academy.”

“And Ben?”

“Ren was… so young. I thought he was much younger than his real age for a long time. That makes sense, now that I think of it — you told me about how you were at that time. When you — with….”

“Yes,” I say, catching his thoughts. “When I had sex for the first time. With Poe Dameron. At the uncommonly advanced age of twenty-three.”

Hux’s neck has gone blotchy pink again, but he continues. “You all share that — this strange, childlike air. Ren and you and Captain Asha, I mean. Something to do with being raised in that Temple.”

Asha, my friend, who ran from the Temple with Ben, is now a Knight of Ren, fiercely dedicated to Lord Ren, as she calls him. But she still has her giddy ways, her lively smile, even as she trains the stormtrooper cadets and tells me that the light is made of lies.

“But Ben?” I prompt.

Hux tosses his head back, accessing old memories. “He was afraid, damaged. Pale. Trembling, even. _Haunted_. No, I didn’t think much of Snoke’s new apprentice on first look, I’m afraid. And then — he fixed his eyes on me, as if he knew what I was thinking. I suppose he _did_ know. And his lips quivered — you know how they do. He was angry and insulted, but he was also _hurt_. He wanted my approval somehow. I was intrigued.”

“And then?”

“You asked me about the very first time we saw each other,” Hux says. “Now, I told my story — your turn. You’ve said you were nine when you met?”

“Right,” I say. “Leia brought me to the Temple. I was terribly homesick. Ben was shy, quiet, awkward — all limbs and hair. I smiled at him. He blushed. Later that day he helped me learn fighting forms. And then we were inseparable.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“It was. We were kids. We did kid stuff, like the twins. Sneaking food out of the kitchen, roaming the halls after lights out. It didn’t get complicated until later, and even then… that was Snoke’s fault.”

“That time you said you wished you could kill Snoke yourself. You meant it.”

“Yes. For you, too,” I say. “But it’s already been done for me.” I trace the line of his jaw with my forefinger. There is a hint of stubble there, not something he’d allow in normal times. “Just as well. I’m not strong enough. He would have killed me. He was going to make Ben kill me someday.”

Hux starts a little. “Because you’re a Jedi?”

“I’m not. But, no. Because Ben loves me. Attachments — Jedi and… whatever Snoke was, they don’t like them. Luke didn’t mind our friendship, but over time he thought us _too_ close, too reliant on one another.” I think of meditating in the library with Ben, helping him to focus on the light. “So Snoke was going to have him kill me. The same way he had him kill his father.”

My voice, so steady until now, breaks. There are these moments, when I remember — a look in Ben’s eyes when we’re arguing, or a memory of a happy time with his family or with the other students at the Temple, will trigger the vision of them dead, all of them. Except for Asha and the other three, the Knights of Ren now.

“I think Han thought I _was_ dead,” I say. “Only Leia — and Poe — knew I was alive. And Poe didn’t know the whole story. Leia just told him I was a Resistance asset and needed to be hidden.”

A realization comes over me — why Leia hid me from Ben, left me to an unfulfilled life that as far as she knew would last until I died. But I push the thought aside for now. It’s something to meditate on and then bring to Ben.

 _Maybe I should stop calling him that_ , I think. _He doesn’t think of himself as Ben. I’m the only one who does._

“Do you want to smoke some hash?” I say suddenly. It’s part of our afternoon routines — not every afternoon we’re together, but half the time, at least.

“What? Did you bring some?”

I smirk, looking into the light green of his eyes, the tremble of his eyelids.

“No,” I say. “But I can call Kayfour to go get some from my quarters.”

“Hmm, no,” he says. “I always feel that she’s judging us.”

“She is.”

He frowns. “Well, bring it to with you when we go to… when we go.”

He can’t bring himself to say _Arkanis_ , like a child who is afraid he’ll jinx himself.

“Good, because acquisitions got a good batch, and I want to share the bounty.”

I put my hand back on his hair, and he is quiet, as if considering something.

“Did you need the drugs that first time — with me — to go through with it?” he asks.

I think of that time, when I was working my way into his confidence, making him want me, defying Ben — who had changed his mind about wanting me to seduce Hux — to learn what I could from going to Hux’s bed.

“I was nervous,” I say.

“So was I,” he says. “But that was because… for other reasons. I wanted you, yes, but in my eyes then, you belonged to Ren. I thought he would kill me if he knew. I trusted you when you said you could hide it.” I feel him shake his head. “How foolish I was. Meanwhile, you had to drug yourself to be with me.”

“I drugged myself for a lot of different reasons,” I say. “It wasn’t that I didn’t _want_ you. I did. Don’t you remember? I was not a woman who was doing something she didn’t want.”

I sense his cock stirring as I speak, and I remember the look of wonder on his face back then, as he reached between my legs and found me wet for him.

“Hey now,” I say.

He turns over and curls around me, looking up through his feathery eyelashes.

“I’ve thought about it before — whatever it was Ren was thinking — I admit. But I think about having you to myself, too.”

“I thought you _like_ fucking me because Ben does too. I can sense that you do, remember.”

Hux closes his eyes and sighs. “I like that he _has_. It doesn’t have to be a… an ongoing concern.”

I snort. “ _An ongoing concern?_ ” I lean over and kiss him through my laughter. But then I pause and study his eyes again. “You’re afraid,” I say. “Afraid of what you’ll want to do with him, alone. Or of what he’ll want to do _to you._ ”

He’s quiet. He pushes his copper hair off his forehead. “I’ve seen the effects of what he does to you.”

I scoff. “Love wounds. He doesn’t do anything to me that I don’t want him to.”

“But what —“” He catches my hand in his, lowers it to put my fingertips to his lips. “What makes you want him to hurt you?”

I look down at him, marveling still at how this man who has killed so many can be so gentle, puzzled at how Ben can hurt me and why I desire it. Maybe it’s because most of the killing he’s done has been separated from seeing the pain of those who have died. How do I explain that Kylo Ren hurts me every moment of every day, and that if he is going to keep on hurting me, at least sometimes it can be in ways I control, in ways that display that control?

And Hux has seen that it is not just Ben who leaves marks on my body — Hux has seen Ben’s blood on my lips and my knuckles cut where they connected with Ben’s mouth.

“We belong to each other,” I say. “It’s a way of showing it. You know what it’s like to be near him — you feel at every moment that he could overpower you. And yet I can let him hurt me without him going too far. You do the same.”

“I don’t.”

“Oh really? Then why are you so willing to contradict him, to challenge and cross him, knowing what you do about what he’s capable of? Knowing what he _has_ done to you in the past? You know he always held back.”

Hux considers this. “I suppose that’s true. But why? Why did he hold back? I assume it was Snoke — he needed me to design Starkiller Base, to command the fleet. And Ren still needed me for the latter, after Starkiller. The man to whom you are consort is many things, but a tactician is not one of them.”

I laugh softly. “Well, that’s true enough. Ben and I are so guided by what seems like instinct — but it’s in the Force. It makes us seem impulsive. But it's not, really — Ben might have killed you if he was acting on impulse. But he wanted you with him — _wants_ you with him. Still — you’ll never have to do anything you don’t want to either,” I say. “I’m sorry, by the way.”

“Sorry for what?”

“I accidentally mind-tricked you.”

He starts, his hand around mine loosening. “Mind-tricked me into… what?”

“It was my fault you fell asleep. I didn’t mean for it to happen like that.”

“Oh.” He is unsure how to feel. “Is my mind so weak, then?”

“No, usually not — it’s just that you’re so tired.” I take his hand and raise his fingertips to my lips. “Luke taught — we learned at the Temple that mind tricks were one of our last options, something to use only if absolutely necessary. Interfering with another being’s free will is a grave violation.”

I say the last sentence as if reciting a lesson, but not because I don’t believe it.

“It seems your philosophical stance differs from Ren’s there,” Hux says.

“It doesn’t,” I say. “But our definition of ‘necessary’ does.”

“I had to use mind tricks on… men sometimes,” I say.

Hux’s heart, under my ear, quickens almost imperceptibly. We don’t talk about past partners, as an unspoken rule. Poe Dameron has been the one exception.

“I tried to choose men who wouldn’t care about commitment, wouldn’t want anything from me besides what I was willing to give. But a couple of times, I was wrong,” I continue. “They showed up at my house, and my work. They followed me while I did errands. If I kept rejecting them, they would have tried to kill me. I felt that. So I made them stay away. I made them forget everything about me. I didn’t follow up on what happened to them, but that kind of mind intrusion will inevitably break something in a person.”

Hux shrugs. “They deserved it. You were merciful. You knew very well you would kill them if they made an attempt to harm you. Mercy as an act of domination, as you said.”

“Yes,” I reply. “But I had to avoid the attention I’d have gotten if I _did_ kill them. Otherwise, I wonder….”

I think now of what kind of danger Ben and I have placed Hux in. I didn’t, couldn’t say to him that he can’t have me all to himself — that without Ben to absorb the intensity of feeling that comes from being Force sensitive, I would be like one of the First Order’s siege cannons, capable of immense destruction, focused on whoever is closest to me. Either of us, without the other, could destroy Armitage Hux. And he would hate us for it, but never blame us.

“I suppose I did to them what Snoke’s mind-wipe drug did to Thanisson — and to you. The drug didn’t seem to have the same side effects. Maybe it wasn’t just pharmaceutical in nature — the dark side energy in Byss could have corrupted the nature of an ordinary drug and —”

“ _Miranda_ ,” Hux says, and only then do I hear how my words were pouring out of me, manic-like, as my brain sought to catch up with what my self in the Force already understands

“I’m sorry.”

“Byss will be taken care of,” he says. “You’ll see. I’ve promised myself — for your sake and Ren’s, I have _plans_ for it.”

I nod. “But not until we’ve rested, not until after we go to Arkanis.”

He looks up at me. “Yes, of course,” he says. “Anything you want.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter:
> 
>  _“You kids and your modern arrangements,” she murmurs now. “I know you care very much for General Hux, but I can’t see the fairness in it. He must know you obviously prefer Ben. The General_ is _handsome, in a sort of spritely way, but he’s insubstantial. He always has such a heavy expression because he’d blow away otherwise.”_
> 
> _I feel myself blushing. Who knew former Queens of Naboo were so ingenuously sex-obsessed?_
> 
> _She laughs. “Maurixa is right! You blush so readily.”_
> 
> _Maurixa is Dr. Zenda, who should not be talking about my blush response with the Supreme Leader’s grandmother. But what am I to do?_


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mira has heart-to-hearts with the women in her life -- Petra, Farah, and Padmé.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the long wait! The Thanksgiving holiday and my other fic, [Arkanis Is Mine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15895791/chapters/37044789), which I was focusing on for Nanowrimo, took up some of my time. I'm hoping to get back on track next month.

### CHAPTER EIGHT

#### The _Finalizer_ , Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

The Resistance — or rather Leia — agrees to our proposal for a ceasefire. High Command is near riotous when we tell them via conference holocall, but the Supreme Leader silences them with a look.

“You will use this time,” he says quietly through gritted teeth, “to ensure that our forces are in prime condition and fully briefed on their missions. Cessation of hostilities does not mean a cessation of readiness.”

Direct orders from the Supreme Leader are so rare that none of High Command dare question their instructions.

Later, in my office, Petra’s face goes very still when I tell her to clear my calendar for the next month and explain what we need her and Mitaka to do to plan for our vacation on Arkanis.

“You’re going on holiday with the Supreme Leader _and_ General Hux?”

“Yes,” I say, and only then do I realize that Petra, so attuned to the ship’s gossip, has chosen to pretend to believe that the talk about Hux and me isn’t true.

She’s known Hux all her life, but I’ve never given much thought to it, since she couldn’t have known him very well. From what I understand about Hux’s life, he lived as a child on the Empire-era star destroyer _Eclipse_ — and this is where Petra was born. But at fourteen, he left the _Eclipse_ for the newly minted _Absolution_ , where his father had established the First Order Academy.

But there’s something else that, in my surety, I’ve never probed very deeply. I sense the unease Petra has when I mention him, but it’s a certain kind of shaky giddiness that I attributed to a junior officer’s admiration for a superior officer, mingled with a kind of schoolgirl crush.

“How old were you when Armitage left the _Eclipse_ for the Academy?” I ask.

My tone is perhaps a bit too interrogative, my look too intent when I ask it — we’re sitting across from each other, me on a sofa, her in a chair, and I lean toward her — because she casts her eyes down when she answers.

“I was a toddler, only two. I don’t remember it.”

I consider this. “So he was a commanding officer when you were at the Academy on the _Absolution_.”

“Yes, he was a Lieutenant Colonel when I arrived, a Brigadier General when I graduated.” She gains confidence in this recitation of ranks and looks back up at me. “I served on the _Absolution_ for a time, and then was transferred here when I was promoted to Lieutenant.”

“You were transferred here when he took command of the _Finalizer_ , then.”

“Yes.”

“And then you were at Starkiller Base, survived its destruction, returned here, and General Hux assigned you to be my aide. He’s kept you very close.”

“My family connection to him made him perhaps a bit invested in my career, but I never relied on that, ma’am,” she says.

 _Ma’am_. She’s nervous about this subject.

“No, of course not,” I say. “You’re an excellent officer in your own right. But there’s something you’re not telling me.”

She sighs and ducks her head, and when she lifts it again, her gray eyes are shiny. She blinks it away. “It’s nothing, really — now, anyway,” she says, “but yes. I don’t want to say because it involves the General, but if you ask him, you may tell him I give my consent for him to tell you everything.”

“Petra, please, it’s your life. _You_ can tell me. And you don’t have to say anything for me to understand that you have… feelings for the General. For _Armitage_.”

I say _Armitage_ because that is the name in her mind. The name that I’ve never heard anyone call Hux except for me. Petra lets her datapad, which she’s been holding tightly, slip out of her hands and slide off her lap.

“ _Damn it_ ,” she whispers, and then picks it up and sets it on the low table between us. “I’m sorry, ma’am. You must have known that for a while, though. The way you do.”

Petra looks shaken, and no wonder — she knows what I’m capable of. I’m not Kylo Ren, but Petra knows from transcribing my notes after diplomatic calls just how much I know about what other people are thinking.

I’d sensed a general affection that I didn’t probe too deeply, but now I see it’s not that of a crush or even a serious infatuation. It’s _familial_. But there’s still a jealousy to it.

“But you don’t think you should tell me because… you think something that you don’t want to be true _is_ true. Something people say about Armitage. And me.”

“It’s not any of my business,” she says.

I shrug. “It’s more yours than anyone else who talks about it. I don’t know _all_ the gossip, so I can’t say it’s all true, but what you think — yes, that’s true.”

She looks down at her hands on her lap. She _had_ to have already known this. Everybody else on the _Finalizer_ seems to, and she’s all too aware of when my schedule says I will be having dinner with Hux, when I will be in an afternoon meeting with him, when he’s in my office with the door locked.

“Petra,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

She raises her head and gives me a rueful smile. “He never even looks at me,” she says.

“Oh,” I say, doubting myself and my earlier reading now. “And you wish he would.”

She shakes her head, stops herself. “Yes, but I think you have it all wrong!” Her cheeks redden. “Armitage… he was like my brother, I thought. He would send me holos while he was at the Academy, and he’d visit me when I went myself. He always had his reputation of being capable of cruelty, but I knew that being an officer carries with it responsibilities to discipline subordinates. And his father… But Armitage was _different_ then. Before he was a General proper, before… the former Supreme Leader took such a personal interest in him, before he met Ky— the current Supreme Leader. The years building Starkiller Base did something to him, I think.”

I shake my head. “Armitage is brilliant — I used to not see that because I was arrogant — but Snoke saw that and _used_ it. Encouraged him to use his brilliance toward… certain ends.”

“I see,” she says, but she doesn’t, not entirely. It’s impossible for a Force insensitive person to understand the full extent of Snoke’s manipulations. “It made me despair for a time, I admit. He brought me here with him, but it’s like I was invisible. He gave me this assignment to be your aide, but he treats any of his own interactions with me as if I'm just any other lieutenant on the ship, not someone who was his sister. Truly, Miranda, that’s how I thought of myself. How I thought he thought of me.”

She’s bearing up well, but I can feel that the despair still runs through her, a thin shimmering line of it — shimmering because somehow it is precious. It reminds her of what once was, a version of Hux that isn’t exactly pure but is from a time when she was more innocent.

“I understand,” I say. “The Supreme Leader and I were children together, so I remember how he used to be, too. Sometimes I see it in their eyes — the boys they used to be. I’m not sure I could be here — be what I am, if I didn’t.”

I squirm inwardly at this revelation. I’m not used to it — talking about what I am, how I see the two men I love. I’m a cypher to everyone except myself and Ben and Hux.

“I’m glad you can see it,” Petra says. “I don’t get to see him nearly at all now, and I’m too much of a coward to ask to speak with him. So that makes me feel better. But it’s quite difficult to think of the Supreme Leader as a boy.” She breaks off brow furrowed. “So it’s true — you and General Hux….” She is blushing furiously now.

“Yes,” I say, trying to keep it undramatic.

“Only — I don’t understand. What about the Supreme Leader?”

I’m puzzled for a moment. _What_ about _the Supreme Leader?_

“Oh!” I laugh. “No, it’s fine. We have an _arrangement_.”

We _had_ an arrangement, I correct myself inwardly. That’s been all thrown into disarray, and who knows what the new one will look like. We’ll discover that on Arkanis.

Petra looks shocked at how casual I am about it. “I suppose it’s different,” she says, “for people like you.”

She doesn’t mean Force-sensitive people. She means powerful people.

“It’s not an uncommon practice,” I say, suddenly a cultural anthropologist. “There are cultures where… oh fuck it, I’m sorry, Petra. I’m making you uncomfortable. Do you want me to say anything to him about this?”

She sits up straight and presses her folded hands into her lap. “Oh, no, don’t! Please,” she adds, more quietly.

I nod. “Thank you for trusting me with this,” I say, almost whispering and not knowing why.

“There isn’t anyone else I could tell who would understand,” she says, looking down at her hands.

There is power in being in someone’s confidence. You are the one person to know something they hold close. You keep their secrets like their treasures. You are the only one who knows.

For years, my meditative mantra has been _There is a light that never goes out —_ from a song that helped me focus when I first went to Gaia, the words tattooed on my arm. I still meditate on it, after days when I feel my light has been tested, when I feel my attachment to the power that my Force abilities give me becoming something darker. But ever since coming back to the _Finalizer,_ when I am feeling weakened, when I doubt myself and wonder how I have come to be where I am, this is what I repeat to myself: _I am the only one._

* * *

Dr. Zenda has ordered us to be on light duty until we leave for Arkanis, so I spend some time on all the things that I’ve let slide.

I play with the twins, teaching them to properly hold their sparring sabers and call them to their hands from the racks.

I call my friend Farah on Gaia, who smiles grimly at me and tells me I look like shit even as a hologram so she can’t imagine how wrecked I must be in real life. It’s been so long since anyone has spoken to me so flippantly that anger flares behind my eyes for a brief moment. She doesn’t notice.

“Other than that, ruling the galaxy with your boyfriends seems to suit you,” she says. “I saw you on _Galaxy Insider_ when you christened that space yacht or whatever.”

“It was a medical frigate,” I say. “The _Beneficence_.”

“Well, it was a very nice speech you gave about finding moments of peace during conflict,” she says. “Though maybe moments of minor conflict during peace would be better?”

“I’ll tell that to the Supreme Leader and General Hux,” I say.

She makes an exaggerated shivering motion. “It’s still so fucking weird to me that I tried to flirt with General goddamn Hux. Now that you’ve gotten the First Order on gossip shows, everybody here knows, by the way. That you’re you. And they’re them. You should have seen it. Rafe was completely stoned when he saw the episode when you guys when you visited the capital and he _freaked the fuck out_. Couldn’t make anything but wordless sounds for five minutes. Then he just lay on the floor saying, ‘ _I got high with General Hux’_ over and over.”

I laugh along with her, but then realize that she’s describing a world I can’t return to.

“I guess I should sell the bungalow,” I say. “I’ll never be able to come back.”

“Don’t say that,” she says.

When I’ve ended the call with Farah, I go to someone who knows something about not being able to return to her former life: Ben’s grandmother, Padmé.

Her quarters are on the civilian level of the ship — where the service workers who are an army in themselves reside. Padmé’s is in the section for senior-most workers, closest to the officers’ and the Supreme Leader’s levels. Her droid, LZ, answers the door and leads me to Padmé, who is reading while reclining on a lavender sofa. She wears a dove gray dress, draped like an ancient goddess’, her curly gray hair piled on her head and bound up with a wide ribbon. On the walls of the room are drawings — her gowns from when she was a queen and a senator. All the lines of the furniture are curved, the colors muted — but the fabrics are sumptuous and expensive. Her tastes are more refined than mine, but love of luxurious leisure is something we share. As is our fierce devotion to Ben Solo.

She stands when she sees me, holding out her slender hands with its ringed fingers. This is something she shares with her daughter — a taste for jewelry. A prerogative of royalty.

She smiles and gestures at an armchair to tell me to sit, then to LZ to tell her to bring in tea. Padmé can command without saying a word. It’s something I hope to learn from her.

“Hello, darling,” Padmé says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I’m a mere supplicant seeking the consolation of your company, Lola,” I say, taking her hands kissing her on the cheek before I sit down.

I address her by the word for _grandmother_ in my mother’s people’s tongue. Ben thinks it ridiculously sentimental, but Padmé was delighted when I asked her if I could. Padmé has a way of looking enchanted when presented with an idea she likes that makes people feel as if they’ve been blessed to have thought of it.

So I ask her, “Will you come with us?” after I tell her about our trip to Arkanis.

“Oh!” she says. “That does sound lovely. But I’m sure you and Ben will rather be by yourselves.”

“Petra is working on securing a large manor house for us to stay in. Armitage is coming as well, but there will be more than enough room.”

She presses her lips together when mention Hux, and I hope she won’t repeat her pointed remark about how much “energy” I must have. My relationships are baffling to her, and she’s worried that somehow I am going to become pregnant with Hux’s child instead of Ben’s. When I laughed and told her there was no chance of either of them having that particular honor, she furrowed her brow and asked if I’d consulted a doctor about my “problem.”

“You kids and your modern arrangements,” she murmurs now. “I know you care very much for General Hux, but I can’t see the fairness in it. He must know you obviously prefer Ben. The General _is_ handsome, in a sort of spritely way, but he’s _insubstantial_. He always has such a heavy expression because he’d blow away otherwise.”

I feel myself blushing. Who knew former Queens of Naboo were so ingenuously sex-obsessed?

She laughs. “Maurixa is right! You blush so readily.”

Maurixa is Dr. Zenda, who should not be talking about my blush response with the Supreme Leader’s grandmother. But what am I to do?

“The thing about Armitage,” I say, trying to feel my way through subtly shifting the conversation to what I came here to talk about, “is that it’s… comforting to be close to someone who has only ever been the person he is.”

Padmé’s playfulness falls away gracefully to become her understanding. I love this about her — her empathy, the intensity of her compassion. It’s what made her a good queen at only fourteen, what made her love Anakin Skywalker even after he betrayed her every belief and abandoned her for the dark side. And this is why she understands my love for Ben — and, why, despite her misgivings, she understands why I also need Hux.

Hux is a perfect package of contradictions —brilliant in strategy and tactics and large scale engineering, hopelessly obtuse about anything practical or anything that anyone might feel; regimented and maddening; dangerous in uniform,  almost frighteningly vulnerable out of it. But he has always been Armitage Hux, even if, as Petra said, he’s changed, and he will always be Armitage Hux. I won’t wake up to a nightmare in which someone else I love has splintered his self and reassembled the pieces into someone new, bearing an uncanny resemblance to but not the person he was before.

Padmé nods, but sadly. Her light brown eyes — a bit faded, but I know from holos of her in her youth that they looked like Ben’s, like Leia’s — have something terribly lost and longing in them. “There was never anyone for me but Ani,” she says. “But I never had to… after he turned. I couldn’t even bear to hear about him. I don’t have your abilities — I wasn’t strong enough.”

“Sometimes I think,” I say, leaning back in my chair, “that it’s less strength than weakness. For him. I couldn’t say no to him, even though I hated him. Because I still loved him too.”

She smiles as if I’ve presented her with one of those wonderful ideas that delight her.

“That’s what love is, isn’t it? A weakness that strengthens you.” She presses her palms together, sighs happily, and then puts them back on her lap. “Now, I know you’re not just here to tell me about your love life, though I do find the subject… illuminating. What is that your mistress of wardrobe can do for you, Madame Consort?”

“Tweeds,” I say.

She furrows her brow. “Tweeds?”

“Arkanis is cold and damp, and the local gentry where we’re staying have certain traditions. Apparently, the wardrobe is practically mandatory, and it’s made out of wool from some sort of sheep-like creature that is waterproof. I don’t expect anything to be made here, but if wardrobe could coordinate with a design house on Arkanis — send them our measurements, color preferences, that sort of thing, and put in the order so that everything’s ready when we arrive?”

“Of course, darling,” Padmé says.

“You spoil me.” I remember something. “You might not want to think about it, but speaking of Arkanis gentry — do you know of Carise Sindian?”

Padmé’s lips pale slightly. “She betrayed my family,” she whispers. “I stayed away all those decades, so Luke and Leia wouldn’t learn who their father was. So they would be free to be who _they_ wanted to be — not the daughter and son of the Chosen One, of… what he became. The Force had other plans. But at least they could live without the galaxy knowing — and tell Ben when it was right for him to know. What could you possibly have to say to me about Carise Sindian? What she did broke Ben.”

I don’t like to contradict Padmé. I don’t feel like I have a right to — she was one of my idols when I was growing up; she has endured so much more than I can understand. But I know Ben. Our minds overlap in the Force; I feel his feelings even when I sleep.

“Secrecy broke Ben,” I say. “He was already fragile from knowing there was something in him that he couldn’t understand. And then the truth hit him, like a rock through a window. If it had been told to him, gradually, he would have gotten stronger, strong enough not to break once he knew the whole truth.”

I realize that I’ve never forgiven them for it — Luke and Han and Leia. I know what it is to have held Ben Solo’s hands and wrap him in light as we meditated as kids. I know what it is to have felt him weep into my lap the morning after we spent our first night together. The scar from the wound inside of him is as tangible, as touchable, as the scar on his face. And I want to avenge both equally. I want to shove the moment Ben said, “You need a teacher” to the girl at her, when he extended his hand and said, _Please_ — to say, there was a moment when you didn’t have to hurt him, there was an answer you could have given that would have changed everything. I want Leia to relive when Ben, eleven years old, slumped on the floor of his room in their apartment on Chandrila, and begged her to tell him what was wrong with him.

I want to say _You failed him._ And I want them to hurt because of it.

Across from me, Padmé has sat up straight. She looks at me with wide eyes, her lips trembling. I know what she is feeling — she has seen this look before, in her husband, in her grandson.

“You might not think it,” Padmé says, “but I get angry too. Don’t let it take you.”

I feel myself crying before I’m aware that’s what I’m doing, a sob welling up and catching in my throat, making me gasp and blindly hold my hands out, the way I reached to Ben’s hands when were kids in the Temple library, trying to calm him.

The hands that take mine now are his grandmother’s, and she is trying to calm me. The skin over her fingers is thin, soft. I feel her years in her touch, the pain she has learned to overcome, the pain she has learned to live with. I bow my head over our clasped hands for a moment, and when my tears fall on her skin she doesn’t pull away. I look up and find her empathetic face, her own eyes filled with tears, and feel her desire to heal whatever is hurting me.

“If I feel all his pain,” I say, “how do I know what is mine and what is his?”

She pulls me closer to her. “You know who you are.”

I thought I did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Padmé's disarming naïveté despite her sophisticated upbringing has always struck me. "Something wonderful has happened!" she tells Anakin when she's pregnant, passive voice, as if she didn't know what it was the result of. So I wanted to keep some of the ingenuousness in my characterization of her, even if she's an old woman. It's partially based on my Nana, who was very much the same.
> 
> Next chapter:  
>  _“What does he like?” he asks_
> 
>  __Immersing himself in cool water, _I think._ Fish cooked with herbs. The half-purr, half-meow Millie makes to get his attention. Tarine tea.
> 
> _But I know that’s not what he means._
> 
> _He means that he wants my expertise as a courtesan, a report on the assignment he gave to me, six months ago._
> 
> _“To be admired,” I say. “To feel the thrill of it, the surprise that someone he wants thinks he is beautiful, that someone he thinks is beautiful wants him.”_


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The triumvirate are preparing to leave, and there's a lot of _tension_ in the air.

### CHAPTER 9

####  _The Finalizer,_ Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

We discuss Hux’s negotiations with Carise Sindian in my quarters as I direct K4’s packing of my trunks. I sit on my bed, cross-legged in a loose black dress, as Hux and Ben stay on opposite sides of the room, speaking without looking directly at each other.

“She wants a private audience with you, Ren,” Hux says.

Despite the uneasiness that hangs in the room, we’ve forgone the formalities and titles we usually use when talking First Order business.

“Is that all?” Ben says. “What do you think she wants it for?”

“Mostly to say she’s had a private meeting with the Supreme Leader, I imagine. And of course to plead her case for having her title and estate restored.”

Ben shrugs. “I don’t see why not. She did me a favor, exposing the lies that hid my lineage from me.”

“Give Empress Lyanna the role of restoring her title, if you do,” I say, shaking my head as K4 holds up a silk gown. “The First Order needs the resources of the Regency Worlds, so you need to get on her good side.”

Ben sighs. “It’s so ridiculous, having to play to everyone’s egos. I’m Supreme Leader. I should just do what I want.”

Across the room, Hux _hmphs_. “ _Snoke_ did whatever he wanted, and look what that got him. You sound like a petulant child, Ren.”

Ben glares at him, and Hux glares back. It’s the first time they’ve really looked at each other since coming into my quarters. The glare ends with Ben huffing impatiently and Hux smirking some kind of triumph.

I nod to K4, who has taken out a pair of thigh-high knit gaberwool stockings. They’re the same stockings I wore when I made love to Ben in the garden at the Gaian senate palace, the same ones he pushed down to touch my skin, the same ones I tugged back up over my knees after we killed the members of the Church of the Force who attacked the compound.

Hux shot a woman who was determined to kill me in the heart that night, and later Ben held him in his gaze and thanked him for it, his eyes and lips moist with emotion. I held both their hands as we returned to our separate quarters, to emerge once more as the First Order, brisk and efficient and united. And that’s what we have been ever since.

It’s worn on us, that responsibility, though Hux will never admit it — he was born for command, he’d say, and he’d as soon become exhausted from it as he would from breathing. Ben and I, though — we’ve had other lives. We know what it is to have days to ourselves, to contemplate whatever we’d like, even if they were brief interludes in our awareness of the responsibilities we knew we were taking on in becoming Jedi.

We never pictured ourselves here.

“Will you give her an audience on Arkanis?” I ask Ben. “Her family estate is not so very far from where we’re staying, I think.”

He sits down on my bed, idly running his gloved hand over the silk dress I rejected for the trip.

“Yeah, I guess,” he says. More authoritatively, to Hux, he adds, “Tell her to come — just her, no attendants, no entourage — the day after we arrive, 0300 Arkanis time.”

“She’ll hardly expect to be asked to stay for dinner at that time,” I say. “That’s on purpose, I assume.”

“While we’re on this… vacation — whatever it is — I just want to be left alone,” Ben says.

“All alone?” I prompt.

“Don’t be coy,” Ben says, almost exasperatedly. “You know I’ll want you with me.” He raises his eyes to look across the room, where Hux stands, half toward us, hands clasped behind his back. Ben peers through his eyelashes, his lips seeming to practice forming his words before he speaks them: “And Hux too.”

In response, Hux turns and nods slightly in Ben’s direction, but their eyes meet again. I look away to let them share the moment, then gesture to K4 to follow me into the other room.

The droid was a bit odd when I met her on the _Absolution_ , from want of interaction, but she’s settled into her role as a valet of sorts for me. A ladies’ maid I guess they’d call it in a different time. _Lady Ren_.

“Tea, please, Kayfour,” I say.

“Ma’am, shouldn’t we keep on packing?” K4 asks, nevertheless going to the auto brewer. “You’re scheduled to leave at 0800 in the next cycle.”

I sit down on my chaise. “Have you ever heard of Force adust, Kayfour?”

She’s puzzled, but answers, “No, ma’am.”

“I had it, a few months ago. I overpowered a kyber crystal’s will and burnt out my Force receptors. My nervous system tried to compensate for my temporary loss of Force abilities, and it was so painful — like fire running up and down my body. I still haven’t completely recovered.”

“That’s unfortunate, ma’am. I was unaware of such a condition.”

“Hm, yes, it would make for a good paper for a medical journal, if there were any doctors left who understood Force sensitivity.” I take the mug of tea she hands me. “The reason I’m telling you is to explain why it’s important for me to step away and rest sometimes. It’s not just my Force sensitivity that can get overloaded. The way I feel about the General and Supreme Leader, it’s —”

I stop. Pathetic, confiding in a droid. But whom else could I tell? Farah is on Gaia, living a life that seems so sweet and impossible to me now. And Asha — Hux is her commanding officer, and Ben is her “Master Ren.” I can’t disrupt her position as their subordinate with my unburdenings.

“Yes, ma’am?” K4 asks.

“Never mind,” I say. “Suffice to say, it’s overwhelming.”

“Perhaps if you cultivate an interest, ma’am, you’ll be able find some calm in it.”

I laugh. “Kayfour, are you telling me to get a hobby?”

“I suppose I am, ma’am. I don’t mean to be presumptuous.”

“No, not at all. This trip to Arkanis will be perfect — I’ll start writing again, never mind all of this… _war_ nonsense.”

“I’m not sure General Hux shares your opinion of the war,” K4 says.

“Oh, don’t be polite. You _know_ he doesn’t share my opinion, and you disapprove of me calling it nonsense.”

“I’ve been with the Hux family since the Empire, Counselor Galan, and I’ve never had my memory wiped. I’m as conditioned by my surroundings and upbringing as anyone else.”

“Do you disapprove of _me_ , Kayfour?”

“That’s hardly a fair question, ma’am. The power dynamic of our relationship precludes honesty.”

“So you do disapprove, then.”

If droids could sigh, K4 would be sighing now. “No, ma’am, I don’t. You’re very much like Supreme Leader Ren in that you have experiences that I cannot comprehend, but I do not disapprove of either of you — that is, if disapproval were an appropriate reaction for a droid to have.”

I let out a dismissive  _pssshht_. “Whatever reactions you’re capable of having _are_ appropriate reactions for a droid to have, I imagine. You _do_ disapprove of my relationship with Armitage, though.”

“Again, ma’am, the power dynamics between the General, the Supreme Leader, and yourself are quite fraught,” she says as I sip my tea, watching her as she stands over where I’ve reclined on the chaise. Her eyes glow a soft yellow, and the smooth planes of her face somehow express exacting competence. “I am a protocol droid, after all, and had I been consulted, I would have offered insights into how such an arrangement could wreak havoc with professional dynamics and endanger the First Order.”

“Such is the unreasonableness of the human heart — failing to check in with a protocol droid first.”

“You — humans in general, I mean, could save yourselves a great deal of trouble if you did.”

“Indeed. But that’s not all of it, is it? You’re concerned. About General Hux — concerned that he’ll get hurt.”

“As I said, I have been with the Hux family for a long time.”

“So you were there — when Brendol was alive.”

“Yes.” Her eyes dim and then brighten again.

“Not much to say on that subject, I guess,” I say. “I won’t ask you what you saw, anyway; it’s none of my business, unless Armitage wants to tell me. But I want you to know that I understand him. The Supreme Leader understands him. So much has happened between when Armitage left the _Absolution_ and took command of the _Finalizer_ , between Starkiller Base and now, and Ben — I mean, the Supreme Leader — has been with him the whole time. They share something that not even I am part of.”

I glance toward my bedroom door. K4 follows the direction of my eyes, but she doesn’t say anything. I close my eyes and reach out, finding Ben, though he’s hidden himself somewhat. I feel a flush and almost a panic from the pit of my stomach, but it’s mingled with excited anticipation. A touch — gloved fingertips against gloved fingertips — and then parting.

“They’ll be coming out in a moment, Kayfour,” I say, opening my eyes, “and then we can get back to packing.”

She doesn’t ask me how I know, and in a minute the doors do indeed open, and Ben strides out, hands tugging at his gloves. He pulls them off as he walks toward me — as he so often does — then sits down and  drops them on the floor so he can put his bare hand on my neck as he pulls me to him with his other hand on my waist. His palm against my skin is hot, dry, and the feelings that emanate from him in the Force are chaotic. He is charged with need.

I want to say “It’s not really me you want this with right now,” but it’s not true. He wants this with me, and he wants _something_ with Hux that he hasn’t quite defined yet. I lean into him and feel his breath against my hair, his fingers working at the flesh through the thin jersey of my dress.

Over his shoulder, I see K4 discreetly go back into my bedroom as Hux emerges, head bowed to try to hide the flush across his cheeks.

“If there’s nothing else you want to communicate to Miss Sindian, Ren, I’ll go contact her now,” Hux says as he heads to the door.

“Wait. Hux.”

Ben lets go of me and stands, pushing his hair off his forehead. Hux glances back, eyebrows drawn together, lips pressed tight. Ben looks at him, then back at me.

“We’re leaving tonight. As soon as we can. Make all necessary preparations and we’ll meet at the _Cleopatra_ as soon as we’re all ready.”

“Ben,” I say, “They’re not expecting us for two days — the house might not be ready.”

He frowns, befuddled. “It’s a house. What is there to _get ready_?”

I sigh. The Supreme Leader is sometimes so exasperatingly the privileged scion of a powerful dynasty that I want to shake him. He sees my expression and his face slackens slightly, then shifts into slight sheepishness.

“Do you think Lieutenant Sloane can arrange for an early arrival?” he asks.

“She’ll do her best,” I say. I turn to Hux. “Will Leo and Trist be ready to go by then?”

“I’ve had everything arranged for our departure for three cycles now,” Hux says. “Your procrastination and Ren’s impulsivity make for quite a match.” His lips quirk. “I will see you both at the _Cleopatra_ soon, then.”

He leaves with something of a bounce in his step, and this breaks off a bit of my heart and takes it with him, a lurch of desire pulled from my chest that I can sense him feel as my door slides closed behind him. _When have I had time to fuck Hux?_ I asked Ben. It was with more than a bit of resentment, I realize now.

Ben regards me frankly, knowing what I’m feeling.

“I miss him,” I say simply.

“Yeah, he misses you,” Ben says. He retrieves his gloves from the floor and then lies down on the chaise, staring up into the black of the ceiling. “I can hardly stand it, Mira — and not because of what you think. Because of the intensity of it, the way it’s so like how I feel.”

 _He told me first_ , I think. _Hux told me he loves me before you did._

Ben says nothing for a moment then gestures to the narrow space beside him on the chaise. “Lie back down.”

I half-drape my body over his to fit, settling my cheek on his shoulder. When he speaks again, his voice is very quiet, almost whispered, perhaps not even mostly his voice — perhaps it’s just a feeling of his words in my mind.

“What does he like?” he asks.

 _Immersing himself in cool water_ , I think. _Fish cooked with herbs. The half-purr, half-meow Millie makes to get his attention. Tarine tea._

But I know that’s not what he means.

He means that he wants my expertise as a courtesan, a report on the assignment he gave to me, six months ago.

“To be admired,” I say. “To feel the thrill of it, the surprise that someone he wants thinks he is beautiful, that someone he thinks is beautiful wants him.”

“Yes, but how….” Ben shifts where he lies and furrows his brows at the ceiling.

“One of the vows in an old Gaian marriage ceremony — don’t worry, I’m not implying anything — one of them is ‘with my body I thee worship.’ That’s what he wants. But just how — that’s going to be different.”

“In what way.” In his tension, Ben is using his Kylo Ren intonation, stating questions rather than asking them.

“Well, think about it. If Hux came to you and asked about me, ‘What does she like?’ — what would you say? What I like _you_ to do to me? ‘She likes to be held down, she likes to be bitten, she likes to spit out obscene insults as she turns things around and fucks you into the mattress?”

Heat emanates from Ben’s face. “Maybe not exactly like that.”

“But it would be wrong,” I say.

“You _don’t_ like that?” There’s a hitch of concern in his voice. “And it’s not like that every time.”

“No, I do — I keep telling you, Ben, I wouldn’t let you do it if I didn’t like it — but that’s just it, I like it when _you_ do that. If Hux tried any of that, it would just be… ridiculous, maybe? Wrong, just all wrong.”

“So….”

“So what he wants _specifically_ from you is not the same as what he wants from me.”

“And what does he want from you?”

These are questions he has never allowed himself to ask. I’ve felt them, simmering in the back of his mind. I don’t know how to answer. _He wants me on my back, pliant and willing; he wants me on top of him, my thighs squeezing his hips; he wants me in a nest of pillows and blankets on the floor — we always end up on the floor somehow_.

“Tenderness,” I say, knowing that Ben can sense the rest of it. “To feel like I belong to him, even if for a few hours.”

“Yes, but —”

“ _Ben_ ,” I say. “This is something you two will have to figure out yourselves. I can’t tell you how to fuck Hux.”

His face blazes against my brow. “Maybe though… Maybe you could… show me.”

I laugh. “Oh, is this what all of that was leading up to? May I remind you of the time you accidentally saw Hux and me together? When you destroyed our quarters on the _Supremacy_?”

“This would be different. Could you?”

“No,” I say. Even though the thought of them, flesh and flesh, Hux’s slender frame almost hidden beneath Ben’s broad body, Ben’s teeth at Hux’s pale throat, Hux’s fingers digging into Ben’s back, and — I know how they sound, how they smell, how their faces transform in their pleasure — it all makes my cheeks tingle and breath catch, and a pleasant ache begin between my legs. I squirm.

Ben feels all this, tenses. “No.”

I steady my breathing. “Not the first time, anyway. Remember what he said? Both of us together… we tend to be _a lot_ when we’re both chasing the same thing. Just ask the Church of the Force.” I laugh, and then am horrified at myself for making light of it. I walked around twenty dead bodies that night and had to hide the sight of them from a child. “Anyway, you have to have this alone together before I get involved. You have to learn what you are to each other.”

“I thought you would say that,” he says.

“It’s normal to be anxious,” I say.

“Except for you, Hux would be — he’d be the only one.” His voice is muffled.

“I know.”

“Hux has been with men before, I think,” he says, turning his body slightly toward me, trying to close some kind of distance he feels between us. “He’ll know what… he’ll know.”

I feel the muscles of his stomach ripple under my palm and feel the same thrill his body always gives me — the size and strength of it. And, through the Force, I feel his own awareness of his body, of how I touch it, of where his shoulder was getting sore from holding his arm around me. I shift so he can move.

“Do you ever think that the Jedi Order forbade attachments, forbade _this,_ because they knew it could make individual Jedi _too_ strong?” I ask.

“I wouldn’t put it past them. So many of the teachings are about maintaining control over your abilities.”

“Maybe it’s not just control, maybe it’s power as well. The Jedi during the Old Republic were so powerful because they drew on each other to strengthen themselves, but they were still supposed to keep themselves separate, unattached. But… what if, say, Obi-Wan and your grandfather had been lovers? How would have that —”

“ _Mira._ Please.”

“All right. Then us. Look at us. When I first spoke to Asha again, she said she saw that it was the way it had always been with us — we’re stronger together. Even with everything that’s happened —” _You killed them all_ , I think — “our bond has made us capable of… of all this! The First Order — it’s _ours_. Ours and Hux’s. And _Hux._ Hux is ours, too. There are times when I think we could have anything we want.”

“And there it is,” Ben says, and I listen to his voice rumble in his chest.

“That’s why — no attachments. Because we _could_. We could have anything we want. Everything.”

He turns his body completely to face me and puts his hand against my face. It’s enough to make me shudder, the way his palm envelopes my whole cheek, his fingertips in my hair.

“We will,” he says. “It’ll all be ours.”

“And Hux’s too,” I say.

“Hux’s too.”

His husky voice would be all I need to know, but of course I feel his need through the Force and the in the quiver of his cock against my thigh. It’s an unspoken conversation, then — I turn onto my back — _Get on top of me_ — and he braces himself on his palms as he looks down at me, lips wet — _Spread your legs_ — and then it’s _Kiss me, kiss me, ah fuck, you — yes —_ and it becomes a litany of wordless sensations, a language spoken only through desire. And I realize that what I’m tasting on his lips, besides the cassia and his own lust, is Armitage. _Armitage_ , as only I ever call him — his lips have been there, and he wanted to devour Kylo Ren’s mouth as much as I do now, but his lips had not parted, and I feel the trembling of want suppressed — or at least delayed. I do what Hux couldn’t bring himself to do — I open my mouth and I suck Ben’s bottom lip between my teeth and whimper at him, letting him know that I know, and want him all the more for it.

Together, Force-aided, we pull off his shirt, then his mouth is covering mine, and he’s making wordless swearing sounds as he tries to find the hem of my dress. He’s torn so many of them. Tore one in half, the first time. He’s finally found the slit up the side of the skirt and has his hand gripped tightly around the flesh of my inner thigh, when there’s a voice — a choked back “Ah!” and then a hasty throat clearing.

We turn and look, and it’s Hux, standing at the door, dressed to travel in an impeccable uniform, his greatcoat draped over his shoulders.

I smile and Hux returns it, weakly.

“Ah, Armitage,” I say. “We were just thinking of you.”

He flushes his lovely ginger flush, to the tips of his ears, mottled red on his neck and cheeks.

“Ah, erm — Kayfour must have opened the door from your room, not knowing that you were —”

Ben slides his hand down my thigh and then sits up. “No,” he says. “I opened it.”

“You wanted me to see this,” Hux says.

Ben gives a quick, rare smile. “It’s only fair.”

Hux can’t help but dart his eyes at Ben’s cock, obviously still hard as it strains the front of his casual pants. And then they wander to my exposed inner thigh, to the faint glisten left by Ben’s fingertips. Hux is hardening in his jodhpurs, his color heightening even more as Ben and I regard him.

“I — I came to report that I’m ready to leave anytime,” Hux says. He swallows, meets Ben’s eyes. “Supreme Leader.”

I sit up next to Ben now, and there we are, as if enthroned on my chaise longue — King and Consort, and Hux our supplicant, our delight, our favorite — _ours_.

“I think we’ve delayed our departure long enough,” I say. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter:
> 
> _A second later, the door to my quarters opens and he lurches in, a dark shape in the dim room. As he nears, I can see the red slash of his mouth, his eyes still with the wideness of one shocked out of sleep. His shoulders are at a slant, his hands balled into fists near his hips. A mad scientist’s creature of a man — and yet I am not afraid of him right now._


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The trip to Arkanis does not prove to be uneventful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a reminder -- the planet where Mira spent eight years in exile, Gaia, is Earth. I did that originally just so I wouldn't have to invent folklore and culture and all that. It seems a bit silly now, but I'm sticking with it -- that's why she refers to events and figures from our own history.

### CHAPTER 10

#### The Cleopatra, Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

We all wear full dress uniform to go to the hangar where the _Cleopatra_ is. It’s a changing of command — the Supreme Leader and the General are handing off the _Finalizer_ to Captain Peavey while we are away — so there’s an element of formality. Ben and I wear our lightsabers at our hips — mine feels as natural there as any of my clothing now, as does the feeling of authority. All those eyes on us, so invested in our strength, and — increasingly — believing in it. Starkiller Base’s destruction and Snoke’s death had caused the belief to waiver, but our little familial group has somehow bolstered it. There is a future in us, they think. We are young and we are ready to bring about a new era.

Hux keeps Leo and Trist from skidding over the shiny floors or chasing BB units with nothing more than a fixed glance, and not even a particularly stern one. The twins adore him in the way only eight-year-old boys can adore their idols and shadow his movements, their blond hair combed flat, wearing short-pants versions of Academy cadets’ uniforms. I’d rather, as Force-users, they follow my and the Supreme Leader’s example, being separate from the military hierarchy, but the twins have made it clear who their mentor is. And who, as time goes by, is increasingly their father figure. Ben and I are much like what we were to the padawans at the Temple to them. They are respectful, but it’s almost amusing how little they are awed by the presence of the mighty Supreme Leader Kylo Ren. They’re all too willing to show off their Force skills to him, even if they spill the filled-to-the-brim pot of water that they’re supposed to be practicing moving smoothly on his boots or tumble into him in their rush to be the first to demonstrate their newly-learned forms. He, in turn, sometimes carries them on his back, the way Chewbacca used to do with us, or allows them to sit near him, silent and still, while he meditates.

They call him Master Ren.

They call me Miss Mira, and this is the name they send to me through the Force as we walk by the ranks of officers who are seeing us off. We are on a diplomatic mission, the officers have been told, which is not untrue. I nod at them while I try to make sense of the twins’ messaging to me — Leo and Trist are still too untrained for their Force communication to be clear.

_Miss Mira Miss Mira when will we I want to go into hyperspace pilot the ship but Trist says but Leo isn’t there’s not enough room not being fair because in the cockpit he got to sit in the Silencer and Hux says but Hux says_

I look at them more sternly than Hux does and send, _Quiet. Wait. Follow General Hux’s example_ to them.

And they do, grasping their hands behind their backs and walking with measured steps, their chins lifted. I sense the amusement of the officers, to whom I give small smiles to show I share it. I see Mitaka standing near the ramp to the _Cleopatra._ Recent renovations cast aside all pretense of my personal ship being a civilian freighter. The dull gray exterior she had when she arrived on Gaia carrying Ben and Hux has been replaced with a sleek black hull, an angled ovoid shape that looks both luxurious and dangerous. The solar arrays are gold, the lines of the ship highlighted with strips of silver. She’s an ostentatious ship, worthy of her name, and equipped with more shielding and weaponry than any other light-freighter-turned-luxury-barge in the galaxy.

I imagined Mitaka would be relieved to have some time without having to look after the twins, and he is, but also he’s sorry to see them go, somehow. He’s sorry to see Hux go. And me. He remembers that I’ve been kind to him. Regarding the Supreme Leader, he is simultaneously terrified and utterly crestfallen. He’s afraid of Kylo Ren, but also feels a sense of security in being in the same place as him. The only thing that can hurt him, he thinks, as long as the Supreme Leader is present, is the Supreme Leader himself.

I pause before mounting the ramp and hold out my hand to Mitaka as K4 ushers the twins into the ship and Ben and Hux pause at the door.

“Thank you, Dopheld,” I say. “I know you’ve been invaluable to the General in preparing for such an impromptu trip.”

He nods, his color looking healthy and his hand steady for once as he takes mine. “Thank you, Counselor Galan.”

Petra stands next to him, and, throwing aside protocol, I give her a quick embrace as I thank her. I sense Hux’s glance from the corner of his eye at us. He is thinking that he is leaving her in the capable hands of the First Order, that he is proud of the training that has made her so independent and yet integral to the Order’s cohesion.

 _You should_ _tell_ _her that_ , I send to him, and he quickly ducks his head down to hide his blush.

“Don’t try to do too much while I’m away,” I tell Petra, keeping my lips close to her ear so no one can overhear. “Anyone thinking they have urgent business can _wait._ And I’ll take good care of Armitage, you needn’t worry.”

She nods and gives my hands a squeeze before we part. I take my place in the _Cleopatra’s_ doorway with Ben and Hux, facing outward at our crew, silent as the ramp draws up.

Ben and I go straight to the cockpit once the ramp is sealed. I turn to the twins.

“You two can sit behind us,” I tell them. “But be still and no chattering, all right?”

“Once we’re in hyperspace, can we sit in the front seats?” Leo asks.

“It depends on how you act while we’re getting to the hyperspace lane,” I say, sliding into the pilot’s seat. The _Cleopatra_ is my ship, after all. No one sits in this seat without my permission but me anymore, not even the Supreme Leader.

The twins watch intently as Ben and I fly from the _Finalizer_ and navigate to our route. One thing the students at the Temple never lacked was piloting instructors. Luke wasn’t above giving the occasional lesson himself, and sometimes when Han and Chewie would visit they’d take us up in a shuttle to see what we could do. Captain Wedge Antilles visited more often than any other of Luke’s pilot friends from the Rebel Alliance, but he spent most of his time with Luke, in private. And there was Colonel Takbright, whom I had a girlish crush on; I smile as I realize there’s a certain congruence there — he was tall and dark-haired and brooding, with full dark pink lips that often drooped into a pout. Whatever happened to them, I wonder, those Rebel pilots who made time for the new generation of Jedi? We gave them so much hope then. Do they see Ben and me on the holovids and despair? The whole galaxy knows now — what happened to General Leia Organa’s son. He is the Jedi Killer, he is Kylo Ren, he is the Supreme Leader.

And now he gives hint of his father’s smirk at the twins’ whoops when the stars streak by as we enter lightspeed. Trist claps his hand over both his mouth and Leo’s, but I smile at them.

“I’m not going to hold _that_ against you,” I say as Ben and I stand. “I want to do the same every time. Go on, sit down, but _don’t touch anything._ I’ll know if you even _think_ about it.”

They clamber to get into the front seats, their negotiations about who gets the pilot’s helm conducted in overlapping voices and Force-thoughts. When I turn to leave the cockpit, leaving the _Cleopatra_ to navigate on auto-pilot, I see Hux in the doorway, looking on the scene fondly.

“This isn’t something I ever expected as a young officer,” he says as we sit down on the curved red couch in the lounge area of the _Cleopatra_. “Jaunting off on holiday in the middle of a war.”

“Jaunting off to Arkanis,” I say.

“Yes, well, we’re not there yet,” he says. “It still seems misguided to me.”

 _And you never imagined a family, either,_ I think. _I didn’t either, when I was a Jedi_.

I take off my boots and find a pair of black velvet slippers in a storage compartment built into the table next to the couch. The _Cleopatra_ ’s interior was already more luxurious than its exterior before its renovations, but now it is homier, the First Order severity softened with velvet cushions and plush rugs and warm lighting. Much of the cargo space has been converted into new captain’s quarters for me, a room with a viewport on a curved wall and a large bunk where I do most of my work while aboard.

The ship is the closest I’ll have to my little cottage on Gaia now. _My Petit Trianon,_ I think, infelicitously.

“What is it?” Hux asks. He holds a cup of tea that the porter droid has brought. “You’re frowning.”

I rub away the line between my eyebrows. “The specter of a queen murdered by her people haunted me just now.”

“Another queen,” Hux says.

“Yes.”

“These queens of yours always meet such unfortunate ends. Why don’t you think on one who reigned triumphantly and died quietly in her bed?”

“I could, but I’m afraid that it’s a bit late for me to follow her example.”

“And why is that?”

“She was known as ‘the Virgin Queen,’” I say.

Hux chokes on his tea and begins to cough inelegantly.

Ben lopes in now, taking wide strides. “Did you finally poison the General, Counselor?” he asks casually as he sits down and tugs off his boots.

“Quiet, Ren,” Hux says through a gasp between coughs. “The boys will hear.”

“They’re too busy in the cockpit to notice anything else,” Ben says. “And K4 is going to take them to watch a holo in their room.” He reverts to civilian language on the _Cleopatra_ , as if we are in a home and not on a ship.

“They’re allowed screen time only after their daily lessons and exercises —”

“Oh, Armitage,” I say. “They’re on vacation.”

Hux sniffs. “A holiday is no reason for their education to be neglected.”

“No one’s neglecting anything,” Ben says, pulling off his gloves and tossing them onto the coffee table. “It’s a movie about the Clone Wars.”

“Oh, marvelous,” Hux says sourly. “Visual fluff that focuses on individual heroics with no appreciation of strategy or tactics.”

“And such strategy! The Separatists fought a war using an army of idiot droids,” I say.

“Yes, and the Republic used an army of enslaved clones with a crucial flaw in their programming,” Hux returns.

“Speaking of flaws in programming,” I say, “what about FN —”

Ben interrupts me with a sigh, and then wordlessly unfastens his tunic and stretches out on the couch with his head on my lap.

“Good point,” I say to him.

I take off my own gloves and put them on top of Ben’s on the table and tuck my feet up on the sofa. I idly let Ben’s hair slide through my fingers, musing. After a minute of silence, Hux huffs.

“Are we not going to discuss how we’re going to handle Carise Sindian and the summit that may follow her interventions with Empress Leeya?” he asks.

“We have time,” I say.

“Discussions like this take _weeks_ of preparation, if not months,” Hux says. “I don’t understand how you can be so blasé about it.”

“I’m not,” I say. “I just need time to meditate on it.”

“ _Meditate on it_ ,” Hux mutters. “Once a Jedi —”

“ _Hux_ ,” Ben says warningly.

“What are you going to do with your time on Arkanis, Armitage?” I ask, changing subjects. “Do you want to take up dancing with me? Our house there has a splendid ballroom, and Ben doesn’t like dancing.”

Hux shifts almost imperceptibly. He’s still not used to me calling Kylo Ren _Ben_ when I speak to him. I used to always say “the Supreme Leader.”

“Of course, Miranda. I’d be happy to partner with you,” Hux says. He smirks slightly at Ben, who just settles himself more deeply on my lap.

“Keep your mind on that,” I say. “On Arkanis, with its moors and rain and gray skies. Remember the boy you used to be. You’ll get to show your homeworld to Leo and Trist.”

“Yes, I will,” Hux says, his tone softening, “but in a way I’ll be discovering it along with them.”

“We all will,” I say.

We sit quietly, Hux and I reading, Ben lying with his eyes closed but not sleeping. I found the text to Julius Caesar’s _The Gallic Wars_ for Hux. I’m reading Emily Brontë’s poetry. Millie comes out of her kennel after a time and hops onto the sofa next to Hux, blinking contentedly as he absently scratches behind her ears. It is only a day and a night travel to Arkanis, and this is how we pass the time, between meals. Ben cavorts with the boys a bit, sliding down the  corridor with them in stockinged feet. Hux and I don’t argue again.

I sleep in my quarters, alone, and Ben and Hux sleep in theirs.

* * *

In the morning, I’m awakened with a call. It’s Petra. I squint at her tiny figure on my mobile holo projector. Even at this size, I can tell she’s concerned.

“I’m sorry, Miranda,” she says. “I know you’re on holiday, but your updated schedule didn’t get relayed to the Resistance.” She frowns.

“And so?” I ask, groaning and propping myself up on one elbow.

“And so Captain Dameron is insisting on speaking to you. I refused for as long as I could — until General Organa intervened.”

_Leia. What could possibly be so urgent that she would speak to my aide?_

“But it’s Captain Dameron who wants to speak to me, not General Organa?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She keeps sending Poe to speak to me. There must be a reason. I had assumed she thought it would disarm me, but surely she sees that tactic hasn’t worked. She is withholding herself to assert her power — just as we are — but also…. I close my eyes, but I can barely find her in the Force. It isn’t as if she’s closed herself off — it’s more like her energy is spent, that her consciousness is too weary to make much more than a flicker in the Force.

This just bolsters what I have suspected — that she is not ready to face me. To face me means to face Kylo Ren next, and, unlike me, she can’t bear to see what her son has transformed into. I am almost angry, realizing this. Her way of coping is to pretend as if Ben Solo is gone, as if he is dead. But he is not. The boy I loved is there, and so is her son. Her denial doesn’t change that.

What to do with this information, though?

“Shall I tell Captain Dameron you’re not available?” Petra asks.

“No, just give me a minute and then put him through.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I sit up on my bed, rub my eyes, and smooth my hair down. I’m in pajamas, but Poe won’t be able to tell, and I don’t care if he can. Still, I turn the lights on to only 50%.

“Poe,” I say, as soon as I hear the comm blip. “What is it now? I thought we had everything settled.”

His image is fritzing — the combination of our lightspeed and the Resistance encryption disrupting the signal — but I hear his voice clearly enough.

“Ah, right — settled so you can take a little trip before negotiations. I hope it’ll be relaxing.”

My hands go cold, but I swallow and force myself to keep my tone light. “Well, I think I’ll be far more comfortable than you and the the rest of the Resistance in the little hidey-hole you’ve staked out as your latest base.”

Through the wavering, I see his damnably cocky smile. “Aren’t you at least a little curious about how we know you’re no longer on the _Finalizer?_ ”

“Who says you do?”

“Miranda,” Poe says, “you and your Jedi mind know I’m not bluffing. The real question is what are _we_ going to do with this information?”

“What _can_ you do?” I ask, stalling to try to scan for what Poe knows. “Whether I am on the _Finalizer_ or not, I’m not integral to the current mission. The occupation of Coruscant is total, and the fleet is untouchable. And as long as the fleet is safe, I am safe. Let’s just say I’m _not_ on the _Finalizer_ — that happens often enough, what with my humanitarian missions —” Poe scoffs here — “if the Resistance attempted to harm me, especially just as we negotiated a ceasefire, the consequences would be disastrous for you.”

Poe nods. “Sure, sure. But I’m sure you understand the cost-benefits of the situation. I really don’t understand your hubris. The First Order Triumvirate, hurtling through space in a small transport — we thought it foolish enough that the three of you were on the same star destroyer, but this is beyond arrogance, isn’t it?”

I laugh. “You want me to ask where you’ve gotten your information. But you don’t have as much as you want me to believe you do.”

He spreads his arms, palms out. “You got me, so I might as well ‘fess up — we know Kylo Ren is with you, but we can’t be sure about General Hux. We’re just assuming he is because we know the three of you like being so _cozy_. Your propvids tell more than you intend them to.”

I want to say I don’t believe him, but I know he’s telling the truth.

“So you see,” Poe says in response to my silence, “you’re not the only one who can _sense_ things. We have someone whose tie to the Supreme Leader is unshakable.”

I don’t let my expression betray my sudden understanding. Of why Leia’s presence in the Force is faint and weary, of why the Resistance knows my whereabouts and Ben’s, but not Hux’s. Hubris indeed. Leia’s Force sensitivity had never been trained as Luke’s had — she did so much on instinct. But with the girl — _Rey_ — with her, she might have been collaborating in her training, strengthening her control. She could sense where Ben was, or at least where he _wasn’t_. Ah.

“All right, I’ll concede that,” I say. “The Supreme Leader and I are _not_ on the _Finalizer_. You must know though that I’ve been named consort — surely you can’t begrudge us a little getaway?”

“Hmm,” Poe chuckles, dropping his gaze and shaking his head. “I suppose not.”

“Then what is the point of this call?” I ask. “I’d rather like to get back to sleep.”

“General Organa just wants you to know,” Poe says, “in the interest of good faith disclosure, that _we know_.”

At the same time as Poe pronounces these words, I sense that my thoughts — and the Force — have woken up Ben, that he is getting all the information I know in an instant. A second later, the door to my quarters opens and he lurches in, a dark shape in the dim room. As he nears, I can see the red slash of his mouth, his eyes still with the wideness of one shocked out of sleep. His shoulders are at a slant, his hands balled into fists near his hips. A mad scientist’s creature of a man — and yet I am not afraid of him right now.

“Dameron again,” Ben says, his voice a quiet rumble through a clenched jaw.

“Oh, I see you’re not alone,” Poe says. “I’ll give you two some privacy — like you said, you deserve a little getaway, Madame Consort.”

“Wait,” Ben says, but it’s too late. Poe has closed the comm and is gone. Ben presses his lips together and points to where Poe’s image had been a second before. “Again. He’s contacting you again — and, what, to taunt you about my mother —” His face twists into a grimace and he lets out an exasperated huff at himself — “about _Leia Organa_ knowing where I am? Some sentimental nonsense about an unbreakable bond? When she _abandoned_ me, left me when no one understood —”

He breaks off and paces the room until I stand and take hold of his hands.

“We’ll be making landfall in a few hours,” I say. “Come lie down with me.”

“You want me to sleep? Knowing that somehow she’s —” He pulls his hands from mine and raises them to frame his head, fingers stretched toward his temples — “when she’s _here_ , thinking she understands me when she _doesn’t_ — she _does not_.”

“Ben,” I say, sitting back down. “You’re right. She doesn’t. So she’s no threat right now. She doesn’t even know where we are — only where you’re _not_. It’s a power play, nothing more. She wants to unsettle us — you especially. I’m sure Hux would explain the tactical advantage she’s trying to assert if he were here.”

Ben huffs again. He’s shirtless, his skin slightly damp with cold sweat. He rubs his hands through his hair. “All right. All right.” He sits on my bed next to me. “Yeah. Maybe we should — should we ask Hux?”

“Now?” I ask. Ben’s thoughts are muddled — the Force woke him, and his mind is still catching up. And in that muddle, he’s grasped onto an essential truth: Hux knows how to calm him. “If you want, but I think it’s better to let him sleep.”

Ben hums, and I can tell that he’s checking in on Hux, just briefly. “Right, he’s asleep,” he says.

I settle back down in the bed. “Come on, just for a little while,” I say, patting the space next to me.

“I’ll go back to my quarters,” Ben says, returning to himself as Kylo Ren. He stands. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”

“Of course,” I say.

“Get a bit more rest,” he says, more softly, and then he leaves the room.

I lie, unsettled, for some minutes, and then turn my focus to my place in the galaxy. _I am the nexus where power converges_ , I think. No one else is in this position. No one else could be. _I am the only one_.

I feel the Force’s assent in this, if not its approval. But I don’t need it to approve of me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I'm impatient for them to to get to Arkanis, too! Gothic adventures await, I just know it.
> 
> Next chapter:
> 
>  
> 
> _He looks back, unblinking. “You’ve said to High Command that all three of us were raised for our current roles. But is that true? I was, certainly, and Snoke had been grooming Ren since childhood, unbeknownst to him, from what you both have told me.”_
> 
>  
> 
> _I shudder at this, pushing down my anger at the spectre of Kylo Ren’s dead master._
> 
>  
> 
> _“But you? What were you educated for, Miranda?”_
> 
>  
> 
> _I see that he expects an answer, as if I am one of his subordinates whom he is questioning. I lift my chin. “I was educated to be a Jedi, Armitage,” I say. “To understand my power and use it to uphold justice in the galaxy.”_
> 
>  
> 
> _“Justice as defined by a traitor to the Empire,” Hux says, with a trace of a sneer._
> 
>  
> 
> _“I am not under anyone’s thumb,” I say. “I lived eight years on my own, utterly on my own — abandoned by the heroes of the New Republic, forgotten. I don’t owe Leia my loyalty.”_


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The triumvirate prepare to land on Arkanis.

### CHAPTER 11

#### Arkanis, Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

Ben and Hux are already awake, sitting on the couch, the remnants of their breakfasts on the table, when I come out. They haven’t dressed yet, and the effect of seeing them together like this— Ben barefoot, Hux in his dressing gown — is disconcerting. Ben is sprawled out, his arms stretched along the back of the couch, his head lowered. The porter droid, picking up my presence on its sensors, immediately glides off to fetch my tea and pastries. Ben smirks slightly — there it is again, that ghost of Han on his face — and looks up at me through his hair as I come over to sit down.

“I told you,” Ben says. “She’s as unconcerned as always.”

“Don’t use the third person pronoun to talk about me when I’m right here,” I say, annoyed.

“ _Mira_ is unconcerned as always, then,” Ben corrects.

“And I’m not _unconcerned_ ; I’m confident in our position,” I say. “And why are you so amused by that?”

“I’m not amused,” Ben says quietly. “I’m proud. You know you’re untouchable.” He practically whispers at the end, leaning in close enough for me to feel his breath on my cheek.

Hux hums as if to remind us of his presence. “For once we’re in agreement, Miranda,” he says. “Frankly, this latest attempt of theirs at psyops is patently pathetic, indicative of their desperation.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But don’t underestimate Leia Organa. She’s been doing this longer than any of us have.”

What I don’t say is that the ploy has had some of the desired effect. I can’t help but think of Leia — her kindness to my mother and me when I was a child, her awe and love of her son, her pain when she lost him. I think of when Ben and I sensed her presence this summer when we were on Gaia, her relief in knowing that I was with Ben, even though she had been the one to hide me from him.

Ben can sense what I’m thinking, but Hux cannot. He presses his lips together. “Just like all the Imperials in the Order,” he says. “They doubted we three were capable, and look what we’ve accomplished.”

I hate the thrill of accomplishment I feel with his pronouncement of _we._ It’s not like Hux to share credit. The “we three” has been a tacit reality for Hux. I could feel his growing regard for Ben and me as equals whereas before even the title of Supreme Leader hadn’t been more than a formality in his eyes. My pleasure in this is Leia’s influence, too — the political ambition, the pride in the skills she taught me. I’ve put them to a purpose that she feared I would when she put me on Gaia, though. She knew that I wouldn’t be strong enough to say no to Ben. She knew I’d follow him anywhere, not because I am weak-willed, but because his being is part of my own. But she should have known she couldn’t have stopped us from finding each other again — the Force connects us. It would not let us remain apart.

“We’re not done yet,” Ben says quietly. He gives me a meaningful look. _We are both where we are supposed to be_.

I force myself to be cheerful. “Not until _all remaining systems bow to the First Order_ , hmm, Armitage?” I say, imitating his accent.

“Indeed,” he says, amused.

I sit down to eat when the porter droid returns with my tray, curling up between them.

“How many systems is that now, do you think?” I ask between bites. “If we win over Empress Leeya, we’ll have the Regency Worlds — five systems at once, yes?”

“Yes,” Hux repeats.

“Then, Supreme Leader, I suppose you have a plan for charming Miss Sindian and convincing the Empress?” I ask Ben.

He glowers. “We can’t have the Empress declare for us right away if we’re going to have this summit of yours on Arkanis. It has to appear to be neutral territory.”

“But to get her to allow us to have the summit on Arkanis?” I ask.

“ _Allow?_ ” Ben smirks. “She should be grateful we ask for permission.”

“Well, that’s one strategy, I suppose,” I say. “I suppose she couldn’t mount much of a defense — what happened to Arkanis’ defense systems during the Galactic Civil War, Armitage?”

“They were completely destroyed when the Imperials fled the planet, and the New Republic hasn’t allowed any new weapons to be built,” he says, and then sips his tea. “I imagine the Academy is rubble now. Still, it’s a wealthy planet, and the Populists in the Senate feared there were still Imperial sympathizers among the Centrists that governed Arkanis.”

“As indeed there were,” I say.

“Indeed.”

Hux’s expression has darkened, and I catch an image of a tower against a gray sky, hear the sound of the sea, and sense danger. When melancholy comes over Hux, the curve of his lip becomes pronounced and his green eyes swim with memories. He has that expression when he gazes at Ben sometimes, and then I don’t let myself see his thoughts. Someday, perhaps he’ll tell me why he looks like that.

We’re due to leave hyperspace in about an hour. I gulp down my tea and finish my pastry, then call K4 over. I ask her to wake the twins, who no doubt are sleeping late after a night whispering in their bunks, too excited to sleep. I hear them making protesting sounds when she enters their quarters, but soon enough they’re up and the porter droid is bringing their breakfast to their room. Hux has strict ideas about children mingling with adults that even I can’t argue with him about. They need to have their own spaces, he says, and learn to rely on their own resources while knowing adults are there to help if anything becomes unmanageable.

The tricky part has been getting Leo and Trist to understand what comprises _their_ spaces (as in Lieutenant Mitaka’s quarters are _not_ theirs to loiter in after lights out) and what _unmanageable_ is (accidentally unleashing training droids in the mess hall _is_ ). Their knowing that they are not unsupervised and that their actions have consequences has gone only so far in this.

Still, soon they’re quiet again and I go to my own room to dress. I’m sitting at the tiny dressing table to arrange my hair and apply my makeup when my door chimes. I call for it to open, and Hux comes in. He’s in uniform, despite not having to be. Does he even own civilian clothing, I wonder. I smile when I think of the Arkanisian wardrobe I’ve arranged for him.

“Hello,” I say, turning away from my mirror.

He gives me the military once-over he often examines my attire with. I’m wearing a pleated gaberwool skirt, black and gray plaid, and a high-necked black sweater, ready for misty weather.

“Will you wear your hair loose?” Hux asks fondly. He crossed to me and reaches tentatively for a lock of it, then winds it carefully around his fingers. He hasn’t yet put on gloves.

“If you’d like it,” I say.

“I would,” he says. “I’d like to see the wind catch it when we step outside. I have the vaguest of memories, of seeing a woman’s hair snapped up by the wind.”

I close my eyes and see it too. “Auburn hair,” I say. “Long and loosely curled.”

He nods. “Yes.” His voice is quiet, husky.

I needn’t say the words that hover between us. _Your mother_.

“This is more difficult for you than you’re showing,” I say, gesturing to my bed for him to sit. It’s still unmade, and he smooths out the blanket before he sinks down into it.

“Yes, well, brave face and all that.” He picks up one of my gloves that I’ve laid on the shelf next to the bed and runs it over the back of his hand. “I didn’t become a General by blubbing or sulking.”

“You don’t have to be a General around me, not all the time. Not now.”

He sighs. “Oh, Miranda,” he says, his voice full of emotion, “I’ve missed you these past few weeks. I’ve been in a rage of jealousy, I must admit, letting it eat at me, wanting you to myself and not having even a moment alone with you.”

“You have a moment now.”

He sets down the glove and I go over to sit with him. He brushes my hair off my face and smiles. “Your beloved gossip shows always say they want to see Lady Ren with her hair loose. We should send them a photo from our holiday.”

“Oh, yes — so the galaxy can know where we are.”

“We needn’t put any identifying details in it.”

“You’re not  serious, Armitage. You hate the way I use the media.”

“I do no such thing,” he insists. “The way you finesse the perception of you is masterful. But I think you’ve become less human of late, with the siege and your being named Consort.”

“I see.”

“Why do you never wear your hair loose? It was practically a scandal for you to be seen on the bridge like that when you and Ren came to my aid.”

I put my hands on my lap, considering whether I’ll tell him. “It’s because of Leia,” I say finally. “She taught me that women in authority wear their hair carefully, elaborately arranged. It’s a mark of discipline, restraint.”

Hux cocks his head in a way that I know means he’s quickly thinking something over, calculating the risks and benefits of speaking. He does it often with Ben, far less so than with me, but I admit I’m known to be volatile too.

In the end, he decides to speak. “General Organa’s influence on you is systemic. The way you choose words, the way you arrange your hair — the way you _think_. She knows this, and it’s why she requested you to negotiate alone.”

“But I refused, if you recall.” I hold my gaze steady on him, daring him to accuse me.

He looks back, unblinking. “You’ve said to High Command that all three of us were raised for our current roles. But is that true? _I_ was, certainly, and Snoke had been grooming Ren since childhood, unbeknownst to him, from what you both have told me.”

I shudder at this, pushing down my anger at the spectre of Kylo Ren’s dead master.

“But you? What were you educated for, Miranda?”

I see that he expects an answer, as if I am one of his subordinates whom he is questioning. I lift my chin. “I was educated to be a Jedi, Armitage,” I say. “To understand my power and use it to uphold justice in the galaxy.”

“Justice as defined by a traitor to the Empire,” Hux says, with a trace of a sneer.

“I am not under anyone’s thumb,” I say. “I lived eight years on my own, utterly on my own — abandoned by the heroes of the New Republic, forgotten. I don’t owe Leia my loyalty.”

“She saved your life, did she not?”

“I don’t know. Ben says he never would have killed me, but who knows what hold Snoke could have had over him in the moment. What she really saved me from was a choice.”

This is what I wanted to speak to Ben about, but here I am, sitting with Hux and telling him instead.

“She didn’t trust me,” I say. “She thought I would join him — maybe not the way Asha and the others did, as his knights, but as… I suppose as what I am now. And she was right not to trust me.” I sigh and Hux rests his hand, still yet ungloved, on mine. “But you didn’t come in here to talk about this.”

“I didn’t come in here to talk about anything in particular. I wanted to see you. By yourself. Is it all right if I — may I?”

He lifts his right hand toward my face, then rests his fingertips lightly on my cheekbone, his thumb on my bottom lip.

“May you what?” I ask, smiling and leaning in toward him teasingly.

“May I have the honor of kissing Madame Consort?”

He calls me by this formal title, the one that ties me to Kylo Ren, and his mouth is lush and round as his says it, drawing out the vowels instead of pronouncing them with his usual clipped Imperial accent.

“You may, General,” I say, and as he presses his lips to mine, I think that I would very much like to have a new title to address Hux, one that is all his own.

* * *

Hux hovers over our shoulders as we approach Arkanis. From a distance, it is murky gray, clouds swirling over almost all of its surface. Here and there are glimpses of land, gray-green and faint purple. As we descend through the atmosphere we’re flying blind in the fog, and even as we come nearer to the surface, we’re never out of it. I feel Hux’s anticipation, his heart quickening, his mouth going dry, but he stands perfectly still, his eyes on the viewport. I call in our arrival over the comm and receive a quiet reply telling me where to set down the _Cleopatra_.

“Welcome to Arkanis, _Cleopatra_ ,” the voice says.

It’s protocol to use a ship’s designation in this way, yet I feel a twinge of both power and foreboding at being addressed by the dead queen’s name. We alight through the mist, and I make out what I can through the viewport. The airfield is desolate, crumbling duracrete surrounded by fog. I can’t make out the landscape through the viewport, nor do I see any people or other ships.  I sense the presence of only one sentient, non-human. Petra arranged for us to arrive far from any cities, and for there to be only one person to take us to the manor house, for security’s sake. Our contact’s name is Aeria Fjorna, a middle-aged Pantoran woman who is the manor’s caretaker.

Hux balked at this initially, with his First Order-engrained xenophobia regarding non-human sentients, even near-humans like Pantorans.

“Pantora was aligned with the New Republic,” Hux said, sneering slightly. “How can we be sure we can trust her?”

“Arkanis was aligned with the New Republic until very recently too,” I reminded him, annoyed. “Ms. Fjorna has lived on Arkanis all her life, though. Her grandparents arrived as refugees during the Trade Federation blockade. She’s part of a community that has been on Arkanis for two generations, mostly working in service because of biases against non-human sentients.”

“Well, well, someone’s done done her homework,” Hux replied, lifting his eyebrows.

We were taught to absorb information quickly, Force-aided, at the Temple, something Hux was unaware of until I explained it to him, just before the siege of Coruscant was well underway, when we still had time to spend together. For years, he had been suspicious of the detailed mission reports Kylo Ren turned in, sure that somehow Snoke was aiding his apprentice for the sake of diminishing Hux’s abilities. I laughed at that.

“We both can summon up perfect recall if we want to,” I said. “That takes some work to do on the fly, but I’m sure Ben prepared himself for it before missions. I’m not so good at it anymore — remember how long it took me to learn the names of everyone at that banquet?”

“I thought it rather impressive.”

“I know you did,” I said, teasingly pinching him on the soft flesh at his waist before rolling over to dress. “What is it?” I asked when he frowned.

“Just a spot of wounded dignity — that’s one of your tricks to disarm people, get the upper hand, is it not?”

“Teasing you, you mean?” I asked as I stood and began gathering my clothes from the floor. “Do you ever see me tease anyone else?”

He pondered the question for a moment as he watched me put on my underclothes. “No, I suppose not.”

“In my mother’s culture, the way I was raised, it’s a way of showing affection. I’ll stop if you don’t like it, though.”

“Do you tease the Supreme Leader?” he asked abruptly.

“Yes, of course. I have since we were kids.”

He shook his head. “I can’t picture it.”

“He’s not quite human to you, is he? I assure you, he is.” I shook out a stocking and started pulling it on. “And anyway, I assumed the way you argue is your way of showing you care.”

He scoffed.

“You argue with _me_ ,” I pointed out. “Rather a lot.”

“That’s… quite a different thing, Miranda.” He sat up, looking pink and thin and vulnerable.

“All right, General,” I said, threading my arm into my blouse sleeve. “Now get dressed. We’re due at a meeting in twenty minutes.”

He sighed and punched his hand into the bed impatiently but turned to retrieve his own uniform.

And now, I realize, coming out of my reverie, that hand is on my shoulder, trembling slightly. I glance back at Hux. He’s still looking through the viewport, his lips moist and slightly parted, eyes the softest green I’ve ever seen them, his breath making his whole body rise and fall. I remember telling him that he’s beautiful and the wonder in the way he looked at me when I did.

I snap to when Ben’s voice nudges through my reverie.

“Hux,” he says softly. “Are you ready to disembark?”

Hux blinks as if coming out of a trance and turns to look at Ben. He’s startled, unsure about hearing the Supreme Leader speak so gently to him. Ben looks back, his expression patient, understanding. I catch one of his thoughts — he’s thinking of leaving the command shuttle on Crait to face Luke on the surface. Confronting his past. But he was doing so to destroy it.

Hux is here to reclaim his past. He takes a deep breath, and nods, bowing his head.

When we leave the cockpit, Leo and Trist, who were watching our approach from my quarters, begin to bound over. I raise my hand to them and they stop. _Come stand next to me. Quietly_. They obey, sensing some of the solemnity of the moment.

There’s a hiss as the ship door opens and the platform extends. With it, the planet’s air, cold and damp and mossy-smelling, wafts toward us. When Hux feels it, he inhales deeply and starts, shaking slightly and tugging at the cuffs of his gloves to hide it.

He pauses before he walks through the hatch out of habit, waiting for the Supreme Leader to exit first. But Ben clasps his hands in front of his body and nods toward Hux.

“After you, General,” he says.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter:
> 
> _“Something that scared him a long time ago happened here,” Trist says. His brow furrows. “Like the explosion in the mine, but more . Lots of explosions. He was little — like the little kids who were with us — and he saw… he saw —”_
> 
> _I squeeze Trist’s shoulder. Of the twins, he’s the one more in tune with others emotions and thoughts. I expect him to sense something of what Hux is feeling, but his memories? It alarms me. I exchange a look with Ben. He knows too well what innate sensitivity like this is like._
> 
> _Ben kneels down and faces Trist. “You have to stop looking,” he says gently, and Trist blinks away tears._


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Landfall on Arkanis.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a very short chapter, but I wanted to post something and feel that it stands well enough on its own.

### CHAPTER 12

#### Arkanis, Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

Hux’s boots crunch on the crumbling duracrete. The dampness of the planet has worked its way into cracks and wild plants — feathery grasses tipped with tiny purple flowers — have pushed their way through. Gray-green lichen covers much of the ground. Hux has his chin raised and his eyes, murky under the gray Arkanis sky, scan the flat horizon all around. Flatness, nothing but the swaying grass and small shrubs with bare, twisted branches and deep green needles. The sun, white with a pale blue halo behind the clouds, is low in the west. It’s early morning, the cold of dawn still clinging to the ground.

Without looking back, Hux walks toward the edge of the landing field, two hundred meters off. He’s still in his perfect military posture, his hands behind his back. Ben, the twins, and I wait at the foot of the walkway. No curious questions from Leo and Trist now — boisterous as they are, they’re Force-sensitive, and understand from what they can feel from Ben and me that they should be quiet.

Hux’s figure is a silhouette of black against the cloudy horizon as it begins to rain. It’s almost indifferent, this rain — as if not truly falling but drifting from the sky, making its way to the ground in a haphazard way, as if gravity does not apply to it. Though we stand under the cover of the ship, the water is beading on the gaberwool of our coats, beginning to drip from our hair.

Hux reaches the edge of the duracrete and pauses before he steps onto Arkanis proper, its plants and its soil drinking in its rain. He falters as he takes this last step, almost imperceptibly, just a slight waver visible in the hem of his greatcoat. I think of his posture breaking as he reviewed the stormtroopers when I sent thoughts of sleep his way. Now it is this planet, which he hasn’t seen in thirty years, that has that effect, that pull on him.

He crouches down on one knee. From this distance, can make out him taking off his right glove and then resting his bare palm on the ground. He remains so, very still.

Finally, Leo pipes up. “Is Hux all right, Miss Mira? I feel… something. He’s sad, but he’s not sad.”

“Something that scared him a long time ago happened here,” Trist says. His brow furrows. “Like the explosion in the mine, but _more_. Lots of explosions. He was little — like the little kids who were with us — and he saw… he saw —”

I squeeze Trist’s shoulder. Of the twins, he’s the one more in tune with others emotions and thoughts.  I expect him to sense something of what Hux is feeling, but his memories? It alarms me. I exchange a look with Ben. He knows too well what innate sensitivity like this is like.

Ben kneels down and faces Trist. “You have to stop looking,” he says gently, and Trist blinks away tears.

“Hux wouldn’t want you to see that,” I say. “And you have to stay out of other people’s minds.”

But I see it, and I know Ben does too — the dead cadets beneath the rubble of the Academy; others, bloodied, running to what shuttles remained. I hear a voice, distantly — a woman’s, calling out “Run, Armie! Don’t look back at me! Just run!” — and here I stop looking, too, unwilling to intrude on that memory.

There’s a squat tower at the center of the landing field, and from the door at its base, a woman emerges. Blue-skinned, dressed in burgundy. A drone carrying a black umbrella hovers beside her. Aeria Fjorna, I assume.

Ben stands, looking intently back toward Hux, not even brushing away the droplets of water that have fallen on his cheeks. They roll off, like tears, but they are not tears. “You’d better go to him,” he says to me, softly, his voice like a distant rumble of thunder in the rain.

I remember when I’m halfway to Hux that there are umbrellas for all of us on the _Cleopatra_ , but I don’t turn back, even though the rain has grown steadily heavier and is beginning to soak through my gaberwool cloak. I have to take steps carefully to avoid turning my ankle in the fissures and potholes in the duracrate.

Hux raises his face to me when I near. His coat is sodden and a waterfall pours off the brim of his command cap.

“Mira, I —” he begins, but then his voice cuts out.

I take his hand, rain making his bare hand slip against my gloved one as I help pull him to his feet. He touches my hair, holding it for a moment between his fingers.

The intensity of his memories has faded, so I no longer sense them. I feel a wave of tenderness from him, a longing to be in this place — with me, with Ben, with the twins.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

“You’re soaked through.”

I smile. “It’s not your fault. You should see yourself now.”

“No, I’m sorry because I forgot —” He reaches into the deep pocket of his greatcoat and draws out a sleek black bangle made of smoked transparisteel. There’s a red light under its surface, glowing faintly. “Give me your arm.”

I do, and he opens the bangle and fastens it around my wrist. He taps the light, and suddenly the rain is no longer falling on me. I see it spatter in faint shimmers against an invisible barrier that surrounds me. And yet I still feel the cold air of Arkanis on my skin and smell its earth and its growing things, and my breath comes in puffs of steam. I extend my hand, through the barrier, and the rain falls on it.

He grins at my expression of wonder. “Just a little project I whiled away on once we knew where we were going,” he says. “The sunscreen band from Gaia gave me the idea and once I took that apart, it was very simple to reverse engineer — ah, well — I have one for all of us.”

“You clever boy,” I say. “Better put yours on.”

“No, I — I want to feel the rain, just a little bit longer.”

We turn and begin to walk back to the others. He stays outside the bubble of my rain shield and lets the rain, which has lightened, to fall on him. Puddles have formed on the landing field, and we splosh through them in our boots.

“I know you saw something of my memories — and Ren, too,” he says. “I’ve learned to feel your presence. I can hardly describe it, but I know you’re there.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “The memory was… very strong.”

“You broke away before the worst of it, at least,” he says.

“Oh, Armitage.”

“Never mind. It’s the past, and the past —”

“Is always with us,” I say, “no matter what the Supreme Leader says.”

We are nearing him now and he raises his chin to look at us, his red mouth set with his full lips pressed tightly together, his eyes drifting over us. I watch the movement of them — from my face to Hux’s, to Hux’s bare hand, to my eyes, and then we say to each other without a word that we must be careful. The origins of Starkiller lie on this planet, and in the events of 30 years ago.

Coming here may have been a terrible mistake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finished this chapter as the news of the Notre Dame Cathedral fire broke, so the idea of what destruction of history does to us was very much on my mind. Hux is reckoning with an act of destruction perpetrated on his world that precipitated the far greater one he committed against the Hosnian system.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our trio journeys to their home on Arkanis.

### CHAPTER 13

#### Arkanis, Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

The Arkanis landscape is a blur of gray and moss green and purple as the speeder glides over its surface. Hux sits with his elbow on an armrest, chin in his hand as he looks through the constant sheen of rain on the windows. It’s a different posture from when he stands at the viewports of starships, when his expression is one of power and covetousness. His past has been a kind of undiscovered country and now here it is. 

“O brave new world,” I murmur, quoting my namesake and mixing my plays.

“It’s like being in a place out of a dream,” Hux replies. His voice is low, husky — his syllables more clipped than ever in an attempt to hide his emotion. 

We have never talked to each other about our dreams. I should have known that he dreamed of Arkanis. 

I dream of Tatooine, sometimes, and my mother is always alive and there in those dreams, even if I don’t see her. And I dream of Chandrila, of feeling Master Luke’s presence. I am not entirely sure these are merely dreams. I don’t talk about these, even with Ben, but he knows I have them nevertheless.

He has them too.

I realize that for just one moment I have stopped thinking of us as the First Order. I lean my cheek on Hux’s shoulder and Ben curls his hand over mine, hiding it completely, and we are three lovers embarking on an adventure. Dr. Zenda was right: The galaxy can wait. 

The house — but how can I call it a mere _house_? — appears gradually through the mist. It looks as if it were carved out of a mountain — craggy stone covered in moss and lichen, deeply pocked and weathered. Skinny, onion-domed towers mark each corner of the main building, and in the center a flag flies — not that of the First Order, but of Arkanis, a deep slate gray with a silvery sea serpent seeming to rise out of the ocean in the center. No wonder Hux had been fascinated by the dragons on my slippers when we first met on Gaia. 

A long wing of the house, more dark stone and windows, stretches to the west. Light comes from two tall paned windows on either side of the gabled, arched front door, casting a gloomy glow on the driveway.

“I thought you said you would be the only one present,” Ben says to Aeria. He is anxious, not angry, but his low voice has and edge to it, and I see her shrink slightly.

“I am, Supreme Leader. The lights are automated,” she says. “Umbra Hall is over 700 years old, but it’s equipped with modern conveniences.”

Ben settles back into his seat, but he’s let go of my hand and holds his clenched on each knee. He wants no strangers near as we settle into what is going to be the shared life of our triumvirate. 

The twins, sitting across from us, look at each other, then to K4, then to us.

“Why isn’t there going to be anyone else?” Leo asks. “It’s going to be really quiet.”

They have lived in an orphanage and on a star destroyer — they’ve known nothing but places where they live with many people around them.

“That’s the point,” I say, sitting up again. Hux is still gazing out the speeder window, up at Umbra Hall. “We’re supposed to rest, and that means we need to have quiet. No one to bother us with questions, no work to distract us.”

Trist looks thoughtful. “But what about the war? How is the First Order going to fight the war without you to tell them what to do?” He bites his lip and then looks hopeful. “Or is the war over?”

“The war is almost over,” I assure him. “We’ve made an agreement for a ceasefire while we discuss how the New Republic is going to surrender.”

Leo nods. “Good.”

“We’re worried that Lussix will get killed,” Trist says candidly.

I reach across to him and squeeze his hand. “Yes, well, I worry about all the people who will get hurt or killed if the war goes on longer, too,” I say, glancing pointedly at the Supreme Leader, who is listening to the conversation with an expression of pain.

A twinge comes from Armitage as well — the remembrance of the deaths he witnessed as a child. He is coming to an understanding of the horror he committed on the Hosnian system, but he retreats farther from it with each movement of insight.

* * *

We enter Umbra Hall as Aeria stands beside the door, allowing us in before her. Its floor and walls are all dark gray stone — but unlike the craggy, weathered stone of the exterior, this is still smooth, each block perfectly fitted to the other. The hard, cold surfaces are softened by thick carpets and tapestries. They dampen the sound of our voices and footsteps as Aeria leads us up the wide central staircause and then down the long hallway of the west wing to our rooms. A kind of reproduction of the moors — heather and thistle and moss — pattern the carpets. The tapestries show tall narrow trees, ships on the ocean and more sea monsters. 

Aeria gestures to three sets of double doors, and next to each are tapestry portraits. They’re stylized — rather like old stained glass — but, still, their subjects are unmistakable. We are as we appear in propvids, formally the First Order. Hux is in his greatcoat, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted. In his hair shines coppery metallic thread. I am in a long black dress with a high neck and elbow-length gloves, head tipped down, eyes lifted, my hair a mass of braids on top of my head. In one hand I hold my lightsaber, ignited but pointed down, and the the blade seems to glow. The Supreme Leader is in his armor, of course, as if caught mid-lunge at an enemy, and the light of his lightsaber crackles somehow. I examine the tapestry more closely and find that that there are hundreds of tiny jewels woven among the threads to make the lightsabers shine.

“How were these made so quickly?” I ask, astounded.

“The weavers here are very skilled, Counselor,” Aeria replies. “Carpet and tapestry weaving is one of Arkanis’s main artisanal crafts. They have very deft droid assistants as well.”

“These are all native jewels, I assume?” I place my fingers on the tip of my own lightsaber, feeling the cool jewels against my skin.

“Yes, Counselor,” she replies. “Arkanis’s mining industry was revitalized after the Galactic Civil War. Its metals and precious stones have technological applications as well as aesthetic.”

Hux cocks his eyebrow. He knew this, of course, but I’m sure having some leisure to pursue the knowledge into practice is appealing to him.

When I worked in the jewelry store on Gaia, one of my more demanding customers insisted that a custom ring have a large arkanite center — a kind of precious stone from Arkanis that responds to atmospheric changes by changing color. On Arkanis, it appears almost always to be a stormy, glowing gray — only after it was imported to other worlds did anyone discover the complete range of hues it’s capable of. I debate whether I should tell Aeria this story. I decide that I won’t — not yet, anyway.

The twins are pointing excitedly at the tapestries, finding details hidden in them.

“Hux, look, there’s the First Order wheel on the border,” Leo says. “And this shape next to it — it’s home! It’s the _Finalizer_!”

 _Home_. What a strange word for a star destroyer. But at least there’s _somewhere_ that’s home for these boys.

“Miss Mira, they put your dragon on the border of yours,” Trust says. “But what are these two circles?”

“That’s the flag of Tatooine,” I say. “Where I’m from.”

We turn to Ben’s tapestry and find that its border is simply a thin line of red on a velvety black background. The Supreme Leader is a cypher, as always.

I walk over to Ben, who has not approached the tapestries. 

“I never wanted any of this kind of… it’s ridiculous,” he mutters.

“It was very thoughtful of them,” I say.

“Oh, yes, you and Hux love this sort of thing. He wants to be notorious and you want to be worshipped.”

His mood has grown unsettlingly dark. I look at him for a moment with hard eyes, and then realize something about the images on the tapestries.

“Do they remind you of anything?” I ask. “Remember — in the library?”

He scowls. It’s been so long since I’ve asked him to think back to our time at the Temple. He did not come here to be reminded. But he remembers the illuminated manuscripts as well as I do.

“Yeah,” he says. “The Father. The Son. The Daughter.”

“And Abeloth,” I say.

I think of words I spoke to Hux, months ago: _The natural state of the universe isn’t balance. It’s chaos._

I have too literary a mind to believe that the legends are anything more than a parable, a metaphor — and Luke wouldn’t tell us if we were supposed to believe they were true.

“Much of the galaxy believes I’m just a legend too,” he told us.

And we, too — the three of us in propvid holos broadcast to all of the known systems, our images made into tapestries, our mannerisms satirized on gossip shows — we aren’t real to those parts of the galaxy, either.

“Shall I show you around your rooms or take Masters Leo and Trist to the nursery?” Aeria asks.

Leo scrunches up his nose. “Nursery? Like for babies?”

“It’s just a fancy word for ‘kids’ room,’” I say. “I’ll explore my own room, thank you, Aeria.”

I go in alone, leaving Hux and Ben in the hall to find their own ways. I wander through the three rooms, none as large as I thought they’d be — I realize that it’s because of the thick stone walls. A central sitting room, with deep green velvet sofas, hung with tapestries of landscapes and animals. To the left, a study, with a desk, communications apparatus, and shelves with — to my amazement — paper books. I put off immediately investigating them and go into the bedroom.

Black wood and plush velvet. I think of the gray velvet duvet on Hux’s bed in the _Finalizer_. I think of my own bungalow on Gaia, in Bonny Doon. We’re more alike than we would have thought when we first saw each other as images transmitted across the galaxy — him a ramrod straight general small enough to stand in the palm of my hand, me a barefoot libertine lounging on the floor. He said he wanted me as soon as he saw me — and I had known with a kind of Force certainty that if I wanted to, I could make him mine completely.

But here I am ready to share him. And to share him with the person who has been half my being for more than twenty years. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier. Not _easy_ , but easier than if there had been someone else — some technician from the _Finalizer_ or a haughty noble from Mandalore or Serenno.

Or Arkanis.

Carise Sindian — now there is a haughty noble if ever there was one, though she’s been stripped of her rank and title. I’ve researched her before coming here, of course, and determined that there’s very little she wouldn’t do to regain them, even pursue a certain bastard Arkanisian general. She still has her wealth, her history with the First Order — and her beauty.

Quite simply: Carise Sindian looks like an idealized version of myself. Her coloring is nearly the same — skin more golden where mine is brown — but her bone structure is more delicate, her nose narrower — and her hips, too. She looks like the scion of a long bloodline whereas I look unplaceable, as one would expect the daughter of a dancing girl and nobody to look. I feel guilty sizing her up like this, but I’m certain she’s done the same with me — and she’s probably made the same observations. But she doesn’t know me. The best way to treat Carise Sindian, I’ve decided, is as if she’s no threat to me at all. I might not even have to meet her, but I may want to see her pay all proper respects to the General and the High Counselor — two bastards who hold two-thirds of the galaxy.

A porter droid chimes at the door and then enters, beeping amiably as it sets down my trunk. Deftly, it begins removing my clothes and hanging them in the large wardrobe in the bedroom. I get up to examine the clothes already hanging in it — the tweeds I ordered before we left — and decide to put them on. There is a narrow, A-line charcoal gray skirt that falls to mid-calf, brushing the tops of my boots, and a matching waistcoat and jacket, close-fitting and perfectly tailored. A wide black shawl, wove in pattern of thistles, confounds me until the porter droid glides over to me and, with soft intonations, shows me how to wear it, criss-crossed over my chest and held in place with a wide leather belt. The fabric is tightly woven and curiously feels as if it’s been coated in some kind of polymer, though I know from my reading that it’s a natural property of the Arkanisian wool.

As the droid makes some adjustments to the draping of my clothing, I notice a door beside the wardrobe, behind a tapestry depicting the silhouette of a bird in flight, its wings dripping with rain. I nod to dismiss the droid and then open the door. I find myself in a study much like the one in my suite. And through two sets of double doors I see Hux in his bedroom, supervising his own porter droid as it unpacks his clothes.

“Well, isn’t this convenient!” I call to him, and he starts.

“Where did you —” he begins, then shakes his head. “Never mind.” 

His cheeks are flushed. His hair has been slicked back into something near its usual order, but a lock has broken free over his forehead. I cross through the two rooms and sit on his bed.

“I see you’ve already changed,” he says, looking me over, “so I suppose this is your doing,” he says, reaching into the wardrobe.

He pulls out his set of tweeds — a blazer and waistcoat in dark charcoal, the coat sporting large pewter-colored buttons. And then — a kilt. Its tartan is gray, black, and mossy green, with a vein of dark blue running through it. His family tartan, from what I understand.

I hold back my smile. “When on Arkanis, Armitage,” I say.

“I’d forgotten,” he says. “Gods, how could I have forgotten? Well, we always wore uniforms, even when I was quite small, so I’d forgotten what native dress is here.”

“Well, good thing you have beautiful knees,” I say.

“Miranda, if you think I’m going to wear this —”

“I do. Because you are. Do you want to draw attention to yourself? We have too look like hearty Arkanis country manor people. You go out there in your black jodhpurs, and someone will spot us.”

“Who, though?” he asks. “You saw the moors outside. There’s no one.”

“There’s a village — Petra sent us the information. Just five miles or so in the other direction we came from.”

Hux looks sheepish. It’s completely against his nature not to read prepatory information, and I’ve caught him out.

“Oh, don’t look like that,” I say. “This is a holiday, remember? Nobody expects you to know everything.”

He sets the kilt down on his bed and sits down next to me. And then he tips himself backward, landing with a _fwup_ on the thick duvet. He looks up at the coffered ceiling. In each square is a painting of Arkanisian flora or fauna.

“It’s an odd experience,” he says, “being in this place that I’m from and feeling like a visitor.”

I tuck my feet under myself and turn toward him. “I felt the same way on Gaia. My mother was born there and lived there until she was seven, before the Hutts trafficked my her and my grandmother. I wanted to feel a deep connection to it when I arrived, especially since I had just lost… _everything_. But it took time.”

“Gaia has certainly embraced you now,” he says.

“Well, yes, but it was home before I was _Lady Ren_.” I pronounce the name a bit mockingly, but I know it’s integral to who I am now. “It never can be that again. The _Finalizer_ is home now, until we get the galaxy sorted out.”

He doesn’t speak for a moment. “I hardly remember our home here, but I do remember a certain sense of safety. That’s something that disappeared once the Republic decided they didn’t want Arkanis to be our home. That was how I saw it when I was a child, in any case.” He looks up at me and his green eyes are very pale and still. “You see, Miranda, the Republic took everything from me. What the First Order replaced it with is something to believe in and strive toward, to make us think that concepts like _home_ and even _life_ were irrelevent. But it’s chaos, not the First Order that make that so.”

“Is that why you found it so easy?” I ask, not looking away from him. “Destroying the Hosnian system and all those homes and lives with it?”

His eyes go hard. “The only difficulties I allowed myself to process were engineering ones. It’s only since you’ve come, and now that I’m here, remembering — being _forced_ to remember — that the ramifcations of Starkiller have begun to take on a solidity that isn’t ideological.”

It’s a cold way of saying _I’m starting to realize that what I did was wrong_. It isn’t enough. I wonder if it ever will be for me. Between me and these two men who love me is this constant gulf carved out by the lives they have taken, the pain and misery they’ve cause. Pain and misery that I become more complicit in with every moment that I’m part of the First Order. For every sentient who excitedly searches the holonet for news of Lady Ren there is one who would spit at me if I passed them — and I would deserve it.

I sigh. “Perhaps the purpose of this holiday isn’t just rest but a chance to consider non-ideological solidity,” I say, matching Hux’s language. “In the meantime,” I add, aware of an approaching presence now, “we shall go a-roving.”

Next to Hux’s wardrobe, the tapestry depicting a mermaid with long red hair and a glistening green tail shifts, and then Ben emerges from the door behind it. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time for the General to get dressed.

### CHAPTER 14

#### Arkanis, Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

I laugh and Hux sits up and stands abruptly. Ben is already dressed in the tweeds I had ordered for him. His kilt, waistcoat, and jacket are plain black and he’s draped the scarf like a cloak, pinned in front with two large silver rosettes in the shape of intricate knots. His black boots hug the curves of his calves, his knees bare above them. I see Hux’s gaze shift to his legs at the same moment as mine do. Dressed thus, Ben’s shoulders are imposingly broad, even without the padding of his armor. He shifts his weight, providing a glimpse of his muscled thighs.

Hux sucks in his breath, nearly inaudibly. When I turn to him, his lips are moist, slightly parted.

“Counselor,” Ben says to me in his low, deep voice, “the General hasn’t changed his clothes.”

I answer Ben’s deadpan predatory look with a lift of my eyebrows. “He says he won’t wear it, Supreme Leader.”

Ben turns to Hux, moves in closer, slightly stooped, so they are nearly nose-to-nose. “And why is that, General?”

Hux pales, his lips trembling under our gazes. “Ah, it — that is, I, Supreme Leader, was being — quite wrongly — truculent.”

“ _Truculent_ ,” Ben repeats.

“Yes, Supreme Leader.”

“If the General agrees,” I say, “should we help him change?”

Ben hums his agreement and we both look to Hux, who nods slowly. His pale eyes are fixed on us as he lifts his chin, inviting one of us to unfasten his command tunic. I nudge Ben out of the way, knowing his hands are shaking and the way his large fingers fumble at hooks.

And I want to show him how deft I am at it — the result of experience. Two tiny hooks at the collar, revealing Hux’s pale throat, the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows; six larger fasteners down the front of the tunic, then the belt buckle; four more, and then the tunic is open, its padded lining holding it stiffly in shape. I pull it off each shoulder, revealing the slender man beneath, in his thin black collarless shirt — his delicate clavicles and wrist bones, the fabric clinging slightly to his narrow waist where the belt had held it. I know Ben wants to see more, to see the smooth space-pale skin of Hux’s chest and stomach, but I leave the shirt on. That will be something for Ben to discover on his own. 

“Sit, General,” I order, gesturing to the bed.

He does.

“Boots,” I say to Ben.

Ben kneels in front of Hux and places one hand behind the heel of his right boot. His fingers, ungloved, find the tab of the zipper at the top and he slides it down slowly.

When Hux and I are alone, these boots are usually unzipped and tugged off hurriedly, unthinkingly; but Ben does this almost reverently, his motions deliberate as if performing a ritual.

For all that he’s so thin, Hux has shapely calves, tapering into slender ankles. Ben keeps his eyes cast down. He puts his hands on his own knees, as if meditating or taking in a lesson in the Temple.

I kneel down next to him and gaze up at Hux, whose eyes dart down to me and then back over our heads. He seems at once very far away and excruciatingly close.

“They fasten behind the knee,” I say of Hux’s jodhpurs. I slide my finger beneath the cuff, sliding open one fastening, then the other.

“Stand, General,” I say from the floor. 

Ben is hanging on my words, on the way Hux obeys my commands now that the Supreme Leader is by my side. We both stand now. I guide Ben’s hands to the waistband of Hux’s breeches, then rest my fingertips lightly on them. Ben’s skin is cold; his lips are pale.

“They unfasten there, with the clasp inside,” I say, then remove my hands. I turn away and look at the red-haired mermaid on the tapestry.

“It’s all right, Ren,” I hear Hux whisper behind me. 

After another moment I turn and pick up the kilt from the bed. Hux and Ben are still standing facing each other, Hux stock-still like a sculpture and Ben like the artist who has created him. Hux’s white skin is dotted with goosebumps, making the faint, fair hair on his legs stand up and glint in the bluish light coming in through a gap in the curtains across the room. His breeches lie in a heap on the floor where he stepped out of them. He wears his usual standard-issue black boxer briefs and black socks that reach mid-calf.

The kilt is a long length of fabric that must be wrapped around the wearer. I press one corner against Hux’s hip. “Hold this here,” I say to Ben. 

He takes the fabric with hands that are warm and steady now. His eyes dart to the crest of Hux’s pelvis, the bone starkly pressing against the thin white skin. An intake of breath and then his eyes are back on Hux’s face.

“What is it, Supreme Leader?” Hux asks softly as I wind the kilt around Hux’s hips. 

“It’s just that —” Ben begins. I hand him the strap of the kilt that fastens to the buckle on the hip opposite the one where he had held the fabric. He buckles it. “I didn’t know —” he says. “I did, but I didn’t know that you —” then puts both hands around Hux’s waist. Hux sucks in his breath. “I can almost put my hands all the way around you.”

Ben quickly drops his hands, cheeks red, and looks away. I hand him the thick knee-high socks and he looks at them for a moment after taking them.

“I — I can’t,” he whispers.

“You _can_ ,” I whisper back. “You’ve put on my stockings — same principle.”

“It’s not that I don’t know _how_ ,” Ben says. “It’s —” His eyes flick downward.

“Ah,” I say, taking a step closer to him so my hip presses the front of his kilt. His hard cock presses back against me.

With a smirk, I turn and kneel down in front of Hux. I pull off each of his socks, sliding them down his shapely calves, letting my fingertips linger on his narrow ankles — they way his once rested on mine the first time he touched my skin, on the _Cleopatra._

I place my lips on each of his knees. The skin is smooth with old scars, relics from old trauma — from before Snoke — that he never speaks about.

“Doesn’t the General have beautiful knees, Supreme Leader?” I ask, and Ben answers with a faint choking sound. “Come here,” I say. “Put those on him.” I change my tone slightly. “Now.”

I sit down next to Hux on the bed as Ben gets down on one knee in front of him. Ben’s cheeks are flushed, his lips dark pink, his eyes glancing up.

“The Supreme Leader looks lovely like this, doesn’t he, General?” I whisper to Hux, lips close to his ear.

Hux smiles slightly. “Indeed,” he says. “I’ve always thought so.”

When had Hux seen Ben like this? I catch an image — the shiny black floor of a star destroyer, Hux lingering in a doorway to spy on the apprentice kneeling before his master. 

A flush is rising up Hux’s neck as Ben finally cups Hux’s heel in the palm of his large hand and works a sock over Hux’s foot. He slides it up to his knee, slowly, and then fastens the garter and folds the sock’s cuff over it. He releases Hux’s foot and picks up the other sock, repeating the process so still and silent that I wonder if he is holding his breath.  He then takes Hux’s boots and slips them on, then zipping them carefully.

Ben begins to rise, but I say, “Ah-ah, Supreme Leader. You’re forgetting something.”

He looks at up me, not understanding until my thoughts pass to him. He takes a shuddering breath in and looks up at Hux, who has been perfectly still as I’ve twined my arm under his and tipped my forehead against his temple, my breath on his neck, my eyes on Ben kneeling at his feet.

And then Ben dips his head and places his lips against Hux’s left knee. Hux gasps silently as his body goes taut. After a moment, Ben raises his head and then kisses Hux’s other knee. He holds his lips there until Hux reaches out and puts two fingers under his chin, raising up his head. And there Ben stays poised for a moment, mouth slightly open, eyes open and entreating on Hux’s face — and then mine.

“Good boy,” I say.

I try to stay composed, but the scene has flooded me with arousal, and I writhe, pressing my legs together. With this, Ben breaks his stillness and smirks at me, his eyebrows cocked. He rises, still bending over us, and puts his hands on each of our knees. He leans over and the corners of his mouth brush against both of our cheeks. His breath his warm, and by instinct, Hux and I both turn to kiss him. Our lips meet, all three of ours, and the rightness of it overwhelms — almost makes me forget what I told Ben: that the moment when their relationship is consummated is for them alone. I want them both, I want their bodies on mine, I want to see them pressed against each other, their mouths on the other’s skin, their hands gripping the other’s flesh.

But before we sink back onto the bed, before Ben’s hand slides up the white skin of Hux’s thigh under his kilt or Hux’s slender hands twine in Ben’s dark hair, before I feel their breath on my neck, I pull back and put my hands on each of their chests, holding them apart. Ben lets out a low growl as Hux’s eyes drop and his body trembles once, fleetingly.

I stand and straighten my clothes before getting Hux’s black sweater and tweed jacket. 

“Arms up,” I say to Hux and hand the sweater too Ben. “You’re taller, so you get the honors.”

He pulls it over Hux’s head, rumpling his hair a bit. For once, I don’t push the lock that falls over Hux’s forehead back into place. Hux puts on the jacket himself and drapes the scarf over his shoulder and wraps it to fasten under his left hip. The brooch he pins it with is an intricately wrought ring with a dagger pierced through it to hold in place. This is a uniform in its own way, and in it Hux regains some of his general’s gravity wearing it.

But still, his lips are damp with want, making it all too easy to picture his mouth between my legs, his clever pink tongue probing and pressing, finding the right way to make my hips rise and my thighs go taut.

If I have to suffer, then so must they, so I let this image travel to Ben and then whisper to him, loudly enough for Hux to overhear, “The General has the most lovely pink cock to match his tongue, Supreme Leader. I envy you getting to see it for the first time.”

Ben’s jaw tightens and he leans over me, his breath hot in my ear. “You are filthy, Counselor.” His voice is heavy with worshipful desire, and I revel it.

But just for a moment. I smile at him and then turn back to Hux, whose face and neck are a blotchy pink.

“Let’s go explore your homeworld, General,” I say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The word "truculent" being emphasized is a bit of a reference to the play _Burn This_ , which I saw last month. Friends, I will never be over seeing Adam Driver in a tiny purple kimono. HIS LEGS, FRIENDS. THOSE THIGHS.
> 
> Nor will I ever be over looking right into his eyes. *swoon*
> 
>  


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A walk on the moors leads to the discovery of a mystery.

### CHAPTER 15

#### Arkanis, Standard Month 11, 36 ABY

We have to descend the stairs and walk through several rooms to find the kitchen. Large metal chandeliers laden with what appear to be wax candles illuminate with real fire as we enter, revealing heavy furniture made of the same black wood as Hux’s bed, inlaid with iridescent pieces shell in fantastic patterns. The candles are a strange detail — the manor is obviously wired for electricity, hence the sensors that control the fire, but its caretakers have chosen to use this archaic, primal form of light and warmth. 

The kitchen is utilitarian and immaculate — a thick wooden chopping block, sealed duracrete counters, copper-colored pots warmly glowing where they hang from a rack, along with dried sausages and herbs. We find bread and cheese and some sort of bluish fruit shaped like a pear, and we place these in our leather bags, along with bottles of water. We look at each other sheepishly as we realize that each of us has slipped our weapons into our bags. Two lightsabers and a blaster for a walk on the moor. Why not?

A door from the kitchen opens onto the source of the dried herbs — a flowering garden where the cool air carries a faint whiff of mint and rosemary, with dirt pathways trod smooth by seven centuries of footsteps, surrounded by a crumbling stone wall and a wind break of tall coniferous trees. We pass through a small gate and then through the trees, our feet crushing tree needles that release a heady, woody scent. And then we are on the moors. The sun is breaking through the mist as we head out, and our boots are soon damp with the moisture that clings to the tall grass. I step between Ben and Hux, taking both their arms to draw them close to me. We fall in step, and in our silence the slow susurration of wind through the heather — the wide expanse of it, unbreaking across the horizon — becomes the whole of the world’s sound.

In space, there might be wide openness, but you are unmoored, even on a ship. What is beneath your feet is no different from what is above your head, no different in either direction. But here, we can look above us and see the Arkanis sky, covered over in wispy gray clouds; we can look beneath us and see where the grasses spring back up after we trod on them. We can stretch out our hands and feel the damp air, feel the coolness as the wind blows against our skin, smell and taste the salt in the fog.

After a few minutes of this silence, a large gull-like bird calls out as it wheels overhead. We pause and look up at it — it is gray, like so much on Arkanis, and its beak and feet are deep, shining black. It is the bird from the tapestry that hangs in my room, the one with rain falling from its wings. 

Hux pulls up a map from his wristband. It hovers in front of us, translucent. “The sea is four klicks in this direction. South. The sea and the Academy, whatever’s left of it.”

“I’m up for a trek,” I say. “You said you’d never been in the ocean before on Gaia.”

Hux laughs grimly. “And I’ll not be going in this one. The sea serpent on the flag of Arkanis isn’t legendary like your dragons, Miranda. The cadets were never allowed near the shore because of the sea creatures. They’re quite large. Carnivorous.”

“Ah,” I say.

“I’d like to see those,” Ben says quietly but brightly.

“Of course you would,” Hux mutters. “I’ll lay out a course, then.”

Ben nods, and then after a moment says, “Thank you, Hux.”

We meet no one on our walk. The drizzle begins again, incessant, and the orbs of our rain screens shimmer where they touch each other. All three of us seem to turn inward as we make our way over the moor. Not a thought, not even a fleeting emotion, passes between me and Ben.

I am sinking into the Force presence of this place. It is old, and yet relatively untouched, large expanses of wilderness dotted with mining towns and villages presided over by manor houses. With the creatures in the sea and air, and on and below the ground, Arkanis’ presence is bright with life and history — Hux’s history woven with that of the planet. The minerals beneath the ground even have their own kind of vibration, though they’re not part of the living Force. I sense disruption in all of these, however — something that happened within living memory of some of the creatures. The New Republic’s barrage on the surface of the planet left a seam that runs through its Force presence like the scar on Ben’s face. And part of that runs through Armitage Hux, too: Armitage Hux, who was five years old when he lost what had been his whole world. That was the year Ben and I were born, first Ben in the safety of a Hana City hospital on Chandrila, then seven standard months later, me in my mother’s dim little house on Tatooine.

I’ve wandered away from them to examine a patch of fragrant, star-shaped blue flowers, but I look at Ben and Hux now. They’ve paused to wait for me, silent, some distance between them. The wind picks up the hem of the scarf that Ben wears as a cloak, making it flap, each change of direction punctuated with a snap. Hux stands contemplatively, his eyes on the horizon, tracking the wind as it moves through the heather. Their boots have gotten spattered with mud as the rain fell heavier, soaking the ground.

We’re separate now, so different from just an hour ago, when I was aware of every bit of their skin, every thought flickering across their minds. But there’s rightness in the separateness, too, just as much as there was in that unity.

I pluck a small, conical cluster of the blue flowers out of the ground, and then I feel it: a tug and a throb in the Force, then a sinking, as if I will slip into the wet earth, letting it envelop me inch by inch. 

 _Persephone must have felt like this when Hades came for her while she picked flowers,_ I think.

I look to Ben, my very own dark lord, and our eyes meet with understanding — or at least with mutual puzzlement. What we’ve felt is unclear. It’s not the presence of another Force sensitive, as it was when we found the little girl Allegra in the woods on Gaia.

Master Luke’s words come to me: _A disturbance in the Force._

A catch-all term for that feeling that pulls at the nape of your neck and makes your heart drop.

I put my hands on the ground where the blue flowers grow and close my eyes. I know without opening them again when Ben has joined me in the same posture. But even he can’t articulate what is that we feel.

Hux is comes over to us as we kneel uneasily in the grass and wildflowers. He stands over us.

“What is it?” he asks.

He’s gotten used to it, seeing these moments pass between Ben and me, when the Force is nudging at us.

“We don’t know,” Ben says, rising. He brushes mud off his bare knees with the edge of his cloak.

Hux looks down at me cocks his head. He has not one iota of Force sensitivity, but he is keenly observant. Those flecked green eyes miss little as they seek out details, as his clever mind works behind them, analyzing what he sees. There is a ferocity in my love for his intelligence, one that shakes me because I know it is what made him able to design Starkiller, what made him so sure of his rise to power. The gray Arkanis sky is behind him; the wind pushes his kilt against his body, revealing the shape of his slender thighs, and the rain is pattering on the ground at his feet.

“Those flowers,” he says. “I’ve never seen them before.”

I stand and hold them out to him. “They’re pretty,” I say, puzzled.

“Yes, but they’re new. I used to roam the moors with my — when I was a child, and I never saw these.”

“Are you sure?” I say. “You were so young when you left.”

“I’d _remember_ ,” Hux says — stubborn, adamant. He takes the flowers and holds them up to his face, a few inches from his nose, and examines them. “These are _peculiar_. Their scent is so pronounced. Olfactory memory is persistent, not as subject to corruption and interference. I’d remember,” he repeats.

“Look.” Ben points to the horizon. “There’s another group of them there, it looks like.”

We follow the patches that zigzag across the moor, a few hundred yards apart. The rain relents and the fog grows thick as we get closer to the sea, and the taste of salt lingers on my lips while the rush and crash of waves form a rhythmic drone. At each patch is the same feeling in the Force, but its meaning doesn’t grow clearer to either Ben or me. Eventually, we come near the edge of a cliff as the moor gives way to scrub and then bare, grayish dirt. Beyond it is the water, steel gray and churning, the surface tipped with white foam.

“Ben, look!” I cry, pointing to a sinuous silver form breaking the surface beyond the waves. 

It crests, but all we can make out from here is a pointed, armored head and a long body spiked with sharp fin-like protrusions. Next to me, Ben sucks in his breath. A slight smile plays at the corners of his mouth as he watches it intently until it disappears before the water once again.

“Don’t go close to the edge,” Hux says. “The soil erosion — the cliff may collapse.”

I venture as close as I can and look down. The sand is silver gray, lighter than the water. I think of what Hux told me, of standing on a balcony as a child, looking down at the beach and wondering how the sand would feel on his bare feet.

“We’ve gone off-course,” I say. “Where are we?”

But Hux is already gazing into the distance, squinting through the heavy fog that obstructs our vision. Then the rain starts again, the fog dissipates, and I see it, perhaps a mile away — a smooth gray tower that is half-collapsed, the rubble of buildings overgrown with heather, the battered foundation of a duracrete wall, marred with scorch marks, surrounding it all. And stretching from it, as if a path, beginning narrowly and then fanning out onto the moor —  a swath of blue flowers.

When I see this, and when I feel the rush of emotion that is Hux’s response to seeing it, I curse myself. I saw him shaking as he held his hand to the ground of his homeworld. I saw the flash of images and felt the fear that came along with them. And I let the Force lead us here, not asking questions of it. Is this what it intends, to hurt Armitage Hux, son of this planet?

Ben comes and stands next to me, a frown drawing a line between his eyes and tugging down the corners of his mouth.

 _What have we done?_ I send to him.

 _The Force brought us here for a reason,_ he returns.

“But Hux?” I say aloud, but low enough so that Hux can’t hear me over the crashing of the waves. “What does it want with him?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe he’s here because we wouldn’t have come to Arkanis if it weren’t for him,” Ben says.

“The Force isn’t just _using_ him, though,” I say, wanting to believe it.

“No,” Ben says, but he seems unsure.

I wish, not for the first time, that were someone to guide us. I close my eyes, entreating the Force for understanding but feeling only the constant flow of its presence, the background noise of my consciousness my whole life. I used to think everyone could feel it. I can’t imagine the emptiness that would be its absence.

Hux comes over to us, his eyes on us but still far away.  “I wonder what became of the nerfs,” he says. “There was a herd of them, to keep the lawn trimmed on the drill grounds,” he explains. “Killed in the barrage, most likely. It’s just as well — they would be an invasive species…”

He trails off, but I feel the injustice: The nerfs may have been invasive, but five-year-old Armitage Hux was not. And yet he was still forced to leave and had very nearly met the same end as the nerfs. The same end as the cadets whose bodies they had to leave behind. The same end as his mother. 

“Hux —” I begin, but he holds out his hand, palm tilted toward me.

“I’m all right,” he says, and then he turns back toward the ruins of the Academy. “I’ve lived to avenge this, and that’s enough.”

* * *

We spread our cloaks out on the damp ground, and our rain barriers converge to form one large dome as we sit to eat. Ben is cross-legged, as when we meditate, while Hux stretches his long legs in front of him. He leans back on one hand, watching the ocean as he takes small, careful bites of the pear-like fruit and chews slowly. His eyes are half-closed, and Ben and I are silent, letting him remember.

“I used to eat tarts made with these fruit,” he says and licks the juice off his finger.

I think of slicing dragonfruit in my kitchen on Gaia, of licking the red juice off my hand, when Ben called me a mere six months ago. A wave of homesickness for my bungalow in Bonny Doon takes me by surprise. I spent eight years there under a false identity, chafed against hiding my Force abilities, and staved off pain with sex and drugs — but it was a life.

But so is this. The choices I made to join Ben, to beguile Hux, to entrench myself in the First Order — they saved me from an anonymous, half-fulfilled life. Hux didn’t have a choice. He had to flee his homeworld; he lost his mother and was tethered to the Order by his father’s cruel teachings. He has a choice now, though. And simmering in him is the desire to throw off my plans for peace, to annihilate the Resistance and the New Republic, to return every hurt he suffered by the billions, to put order where there is still the chaotic tangle of memory and emotion.

I close my eyes for a moment as we eat, trying to search out the tug in the Force and interpret its meaning. But it remains only a sense of unresolved _wrongness_ , like a holomessage image that won’t quite come into focus. When I open my eyes, Ben is watching me. He’s purposely not reading Hux’s emotions, but he feels mine, the uncertainty in me. I am remembering exactly who my lover is — General Armitage Hux, the Starkiller.

We remain silent as we eat and begin our walk back to the manor, until, halfway to the house, we meet the twins on the moor. They come bounding out of the wet fog, drenched — having apparently turned off their rain shields — as K4 ambles quickly behind them.

“Hux!” Leo cries over the sound of the wind. He points behind us, where the sun has broken through the fog again, illuminating the Academy ruins. “Do you see it? Do you see the castle?”

They reach us and Trist grabs hold of Hux’s hand, as if his mentor isn’t the same man who yelled the order to fire on the Hosnian system. “It’s like from a fairy tale, Hux. What is it?” he asked.

Hux pauses, breathes in, thrusts out his jaw. “That,” he says, “is where I lived when I was young — younger than you.”

Leo’s eyes widen. “I can’t believe you lived in a castle! Like the ones in Miss Mira’s stories? With knights and dragons?”

The corners of Hux’s mouth turn up almost imperceptibly. “Stormtroopers and sea serpents, but yes. It was called the Academy.”

Trist tugs on Hux’s hand. “Can we go there? Will you show us?”

“I want to see a sea serpent! There’s a picture of one in our room.” Leo squints our toward the ocean.

“We saw one,” Ben says, momentarily a child along with them.

“Not today,” Hux says, and then silenced their protests with a tilt of his head. “We’ll be here for several days. There will be time.”

The words of a poem come to me, as they so often do. 

 _There will be time, there will be time  
_ _To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;  
_ _There will be time to murder and create,  
_ _And time for all the works and days of hands  
_ _That lift and drop a question on your plate…._

Has Hux’s time for murder passed? I fear not. And I fear the way he looks back at the ruins of the Academy and then settles his gaze on the twins, their hopeful, open faces waiting for him to teach them what he knows. 

**Author's Note:**

> Ta very much for reading! I love comments, so please don't be shy.
> 
> I often post excerpts of works-in-progress at my twitter account — @ZippaSix.


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